The word “fetish” has taken on connotative meanings in this sex-obsessed world that make it risky to use without a great deal of care. In its original meaning, I would admit to it; in its contemporary meaning, I would not—much as I wouldn’t admit to a queer feeling following a dinner of dodgy crawfish.

I have a thing about feet (so, is that a fetish?). One of my very earliest memories is my father’s foot, protruding from under the quilts. I was four, and I slept between my parents. In the wintertime in deeply rural Georgia in the 1940s, people slept together. Beds were big. Quilts were large and thick and heavy. Our homes were powered by wood for heat and cooking. We had a woodstove in the kitchen for cooking, and wood-burning fireplaces for heat. At night, we banked the fire and went to bed after a flatiron, heated in the fireplace and wrapped in quilting had been placed in the foot of the bed. In the morning, the fireplace was out—except, with good luck, some embers—and the house was cold, so cold you could see your breath. Yes, we slept together—a fact that gave trashy fifties novelists material for a reading public eager to read whatever titillating trash they could find about the South.

So, I’m four and I’m awake between sleeping parents and I want to get out of bed, of course—because I’m four. But I can’t. I must stay there, very quiet, until they wake up. Out from under the covers comes my father’s foot. It’s long, narrow, high-arched, and hairy. His big toe falls behind his other toes. That fascinates me. It gives me something to contemplate until they wake up. That may be when I first started noticing people’s feet.

Now, I sit at Mass in the front pew on the far side of the church on the corner. From there I can see the lectern and the altar but not the folk choir. It’s my favorite place to sit, kind of out-of-the-way and quiet. During Communion, a Eucharistic minister stands about five feet in front of me and communicants file past between us. My head is bowed, and I hear, over and over, “The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ, the Body of Christ….”, and I see, going by in front of me, black-polished big toes peeping through pink patent platform heels, jeweled sandals on Filipino ladies’ feet, with nails polished in bright pink, pedicured teen-aged feet in expensive leather Bjorn flip-flops, ladies Easy Spirit pumps, sometimes accompanied by a cane, Africans with broad unpolished nails in sandal slides, and people of both genders, all ages and races moving past my downcast eyes in a wide variety of so-called “athletic shoes” (which only non-athletes wear), and sexy, strappy sandals on the most grotesquely shaped toes polished in lurid colors, sometimes with strange figures depicting indiscernible activities. Fat, pudgy toes of some women with wide feet and cracked heels, teen-aged boys feet with dirty toenails sticking out under ragged jeans. “The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ….”

My father was a soldier. He returned when I was three from Belgium where he’d been a foot soldier in the Battle of the Bulge. He had a Purple Heart medal but no wound. He was fine, my mother said, until he drank. Then he became full of rage and very violent toward her and toward me. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure it happened. She divorced him when I was four. I met him only once after that, two decades later in Philadelphia, where he was a career criminal. But what I remember about him was his foot, out in the cold, his great toe fallen behind the others. “The Body of Christ, the Body of Christ…”