This essay was published in the 2019 issue of the Bear River Review. “My Toenail, Myself” also received an honorable mention in the 2019 Oakland University Literary Nonfiction Alumni Contest.
The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
My foothold is
Walt Whitman, Song of Myselftenon’d andmortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
Preface
Did you know that Whitman’s “Song of Myself” mentions the word foot five times? And don’t even get me started on the ten iterations of its plural, feet.
Originally the poemgraced Leaves of Grass without a name and without a numbered structure. As Whitman matured, so did his poem. He named it after himself for a while, then finally landed on “Song of Myself,” at which point he imposed the 52-section format.
1
It is June, and I am on the outdoor couch under my covered back porch flanked by two walls, four arborvitaes, and a sliding-glass door, cutting my toenails. One toe, I avoid; specifically, the black-and-blue runner’s toe formerly known as my big right toe.
An idea surfaces: Maybe this is for the best. What am I supposed to learn from this experience?
I want to swim in the Mediterranean with my husband on our forthcoming honeymoon in Corsica. I want every atom of my toenail to still be attached to my body, covering the naked skin underneath.
I, thirty-two years old in imperfect health, want to stop working as a publisher of repair manuals for U.S. Army combat and tactical vehicles and weaponry, to solely work as a writer and teacher. I also would like to still pay the mortgage on this house.
2
It is July; we are in Corsica. Our tan limbs, sand-coated and spilling off of the miniscule patches that were our campground-provided bath towels, painterly pink cliffs to our left, perfect-bodied European beachgoers to our right, the hot blue Mediterranean spread before us, a dog is digging deep holes with joy and gusto.
I am reading The New Yorker, a special all-fiction issue. The heat of the sun bleeds it onto my skin.
What do you read on the beach? Walt Whitman? William Blake? Us Weekly?
3
My husband walks into the sea while I bumble behind with my steady left foot and my half-marathon-mangled right foot that is as erect as possible. “I’m coming!” I yell, big toe stretched to the sky like a proud show dog’s muzzle.
I amproud–not in a “best in show” way but, rather, of my newfound ability to keep the sand from creeping between my toenail and toe “bed.”
My toenail is detaching–and with it, all aspirations of appearing the ideal, manicured/pedicured, sun-kissed and razor-smoothed female on her honeymoon.
4
When it is time to return to our towels, I gently point it–the toe I had named Old Faithful–where water meets sand, letting the sea blast through the crevice like water that bursts from beneath the earth through that great American geyser every 35-120 minutes.
Even after it powered me through the Stoney Creek Back to the Beach half-marathon, I cursed that darkened “runner’s toe.”
Now I begin the process of accepting it for the faithful companion that it is.
Old Faithful stuck with me for half of 2016, from April to August.
5
The day before our honeymoon, I arrived to my office in flip-flops with unpolished toes.
“What do you think has become of the young and old men?” Whitman asks.
My boss is an old man.
I explained to him that I would be leaving early to find a foot doctor: “I don’t know if you noticed, but my right toe is not great.”
“I noticed,” he said.
6
Dr. Andrews told me—when I was elevated so high in the rust-red leather chair that my feet were eye level with him—that there was nothing I could do, that, yes, my toenail would be falling off at some time.
“Can I hike?”
“Yes.”
“Can I swim in the ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Will it come off when I’m hiking or swimming?”
“It could.”
“Should I remove it myself?”
“I could remove it for you surgically, but I would wait until the new toenail’s grown in a bit first” for protection.
He suggested that I file it from “both sides” (only later, when the nail detached itself at the base, did I understand and succumb to his meaning and, lest the pointed former base of the previously attached nail stab my raw under-skin, for the first time file my toenail on “both sides” in our Disneyland Paris hotel room).
“Oh, and you can paint it,” he offered.
(I hadn’t asked).
7
At the Corsican beach I compare us to the European beachgoers that surround our towel-plot. For instance, I have a loose toenail; they do not. They are making out in public; we do that in the hotel room, like good Americans.
8
My job is so boring that my coworker Paul once told me, and I agreed, that “you know you hate your job when you wish your hot-water heater would break so you could call in.”
9
Even though on our honeymoon I live in constant fear of my toenail abandoning me—and we thus forego activities such as cycling the Loire Valley and hiking the peak overlooking our Corsican campground—I try to remain calm. It is as my urban chicken-raising hippie neighbor once told me: “Sometimes you have to let go of the old to welcome in the new.”
10
As I discarded my sense of dread and put on a sense of humor I was walking on a beach with my friends.
A pier jutted out into the lake, carving a space for the seascape to crash down on the pier’s pavement.
This would be the perfect place to let loose my toenail, I thought.
I would harness the raw power of nature, of life-giving water itself–the force which has powered the cider mill by my house via water wheel since 1876; the tides of which control and correspond with human emotions during full moons; which makes up a purported 75% of our bodies; whose waves, according to the Bible, Jesus calmed and walked on to show the disciples who’s boss–would free me of my old, floppy toenail.
My toenail paid the penalty for my sins.
11
I know Old Faithful is out there somewhere, traversing the life-cycle of garbage.
12
If you can’t find me, head to the trail. I’ll be walking—not running an(other) half marathon—up the sandy hill.
For every toenail belongs to me as good belongs to you.
