Bras and Shoes

A few years ago, I said to a friend, "I hate wearing bras!"

"Maybe you're wearing the wrong size," she said.

For decades, I'd been wearing the same 34B bras and six-and-a-half-sized shoes.  It hadn't occurred to me that those sizes might have changed.  Instead of moving up to a  larger size (duh!)  I had graduated to those stretchy bras you pull over your head and leave red marks when you pull them back off.

"Thirty-eight double what???" I asked, with genuine shock, when the bra fitter announced a new number. No wonder I'd had such an aversion to bras. "Here, let me see that measuring tape!"

Alas, she was right.

I remembered that day at the lingerie store today because I visited a shoe store called Fleet Feet.  I'd just taken a walk with Freda and had grimaced all the way home. I've complained for years that walking shoes are pinchy.  My feet are claustrophobic and very unhappy in lace up shoes.  I thought everyone's were.

The nice man at Fleet Feet didn't x-ray my feet the way shoe store clerks did when I was ten,  but he measured them on a metal thing, toe to heel,  side to side. "You need an 8 1/2 in walking shoes," he said.  Who knew?  (Did you all know that and just forgot to tell me?)

When my feet entered those shoes, however, they felt something akin to euphoria. I think I may be right on the verge of becoming a walker!  (This is a good thing because I have to keep up with Carlene next week….)

Cotton socks are passé. The socks real walkers wear are $12 a pair (I bought a pair to check them out.) And if you need arch supports, you just slide them into the shoe, easy as pie.

If it's true of bras and shoes, maybe there are other ways I am trying to fit who I am now into who I used to be?