On June 17, 2009 I wrote the story “Dancing Toe to Toe”. It went like this:
In 1968 or 1969 my boys were at home playing in the front of the bathroom. This was a two room bathroom and the playing area (or holding area) was in the front with the toilet and bath in the back. The boys were about five and two at the time.
Their mother was taking a bath in the back room while they were playing in the front part. The oldest was playing with his fourth toe stuck in the linen closet door, not on purpose, just jutting out into the door jamb. The younger one, slammed the door and removed the top part of the toe.
There was some blood, although the foot was in a sock preventing a huge mess, and there was screaming from all involved.
My wife quickly left the bath, dressed, called the neighbor to come and help and the neighbor drove her to the hospital with the kids.
I was at work at the time, and by the time they reached me, I ran home to look for the toe first, in hopes of reattaching it. Needless to say it was in the sock, but I was too late to do anything about saving it.
A year later we had another son.
He was born with eleven toes……
Today I received an email from my oldest son, the one with 9 ½ toes, and it said:
I sent the below to my friend Eric at his request. He is telling this story in China. While I took a little poetic license, and there is an entirely undeserved shot at my parents included solely for narrative diversity, it is not just my story or my brother’s story – it is all of our story, and it is now international. Our toes are going viral, so to speak. (BTW, the nickname referred to below was “Dr. Mengele.”)
I was 6, my middle brother was three, and my mother was 8.99 months pregnant with my youngest brother. My mother was taking a bath, and my brother and I were in this sort of anteroom outside the bathroom that had a linen closet. We were playing spaceman, with the closet being the spaceship. I entered the spaceship and my brother closed the hatch. I traveled the universe, and when I returned and walked out of the spaceship, I saw that the bottom of my sock was very dark. I took off the sock and saw that the next-to-last toe on my right foot had been severed, and the bone was sticking out the top. I got woozy and called for my mother. She came out, wet and extremely pregnant, and saw the horror. She did not have a car, so our neighbor took us to the hospital in his two-seater, open-top convertible Jaguar, with me on my mother’s lap (as you will recall, the rules about transportation of children were a bit looser at that time).
The doctors sewed up my toe, and we eventually made it home. My father had found the toe in the bottom of my sock (I like to think that in this day and age, my mom would have looked for the toe and brought it with her on ice, but since this is not the only indignity I suffered at the hands of my parents, confined to the limitations of their era, I cannot dwell on this minor point). My father said that he found the toe and had baked it into the casserole we had for dinner that night, and that the person who found the toe would get a prize. This turned out not to be true, which was a relief, digestively, but a slight disappointment because nobody got a prize.
Just weeks later, my youngest brother was born with an extra toe on the same foot.* It is actually this unnaturally wide last toe complex, that has two bones and two nails (i.e., six of each in total on the foot), so it is like an adjunct toe piece, replicating fairly precisely the portion of the toe I lost. As it can be confirmed, my brothers name is from the Hebrew, meaning “eleventh digit,” or “he who hath taken the flesh and bone of his brother.” We were prodigious in the three-legged race, in which we each compensated perfectly for the handicap of the other.
And, as you know, the saga of my curious toe situation figures prominently in the creation of your family, since I disengaged my big toenail while helping you move into your apartment building where, on that very day, indeed within moments of my toenail dissection, you met your wife to be. The centrality of my toes to all our lives continues to pervade our lives – because, of course, her name comes from the Latin and it means “un-nailed toe, smooth, like an olive.”
Later in that same day on which you met your wife, my neighbor, Artie, saw me examining my toe on the porch in my Cleveland Park house, and asked what had happened. I explained, and he told me he was a retired podiatrist who had a full podiatry office in his basement, and told me to accompany him. I went to this dank basement, with all these tools covered in plastic and years of dust. He took out his choicest devices and went to work on my foot, leaving it red, swollen and totally nail-less (i.e., smooth like an olive). I believe it was you who nicknamed him. In any event, any hope for a return of a normal nail ended in that basement. Now, an odd, very thick, horn-like substance sprouts from the damaged area, grows for awhile, and then falls off. Certain African tribes grind the resulting horn into a powder and prize it as an aphrodisiac. It is decidedly not an aphrodisiac in my house.
* Let’s just assume it was the same foot. That really brings a symmetry to the story.
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