Friday, April 14, 2006

Bunions

I've been doing a lot of thinking about bunions lately. Not just bunions but the very word "bunion" itself. It seems such a waste of a nice word. Really if you'd never heard of bunions and then you heard the word, what picture might it conjure up in your mind?
I think I'd think of a delicious sandwich. Give me a bunion and an order of fries. I see ground beef on a bun with fried onions. Sounds good. Well, thanks to the podiatrist people, I'm unable to call that sandwich a bunion.
Instead the word refers to feet deformities. I hope this doesn't offend those of you with bunions, but they really are ugly. Much uglier than a good sandwich.
When I was a kid I was fascinated by bunions. My grandmother had them on her feet, which to my knowledge is the best place to have them. I kind of thought of them as a special extra toe. Admittedly, I was a pretty stupid kid, but anyway, that's how I viewed them.
She used to ask my brothers and me to massage her bunions. When you're five years old, massaging your grandmother's bunions was a nice way to be able to sit and watch TV. If we weren't massaging her bunions, she would have found harder work for us to do.
These days my wife asks me to massage her bunions. And, may I add that her bunions are not ugly at all, but downright beautiful. Whew! That was close.
Massaging bunions doesn't hold the fascination it once did. Maybe because at my age today, it takes me about fifteen minutes to get seated on the floor...faster when I pass out. And then once I'm sitting on the floor there doesn't seem to be any comfortable way to position my body that something doesn't hurt.
And, of course, getting back up off the floor is nearly impossible. Now, if my wife will stand on the dining room table and I can sit down and give her bunions some attention, that's not so bad, but somehow she's never willing to climb up on the table for that. Go figure.
Well, I guess that's enough about bunions. If I was motivated, I'd start some sort of campaign to get the name "bunions" changed to something like bone-warts, maybe, and then I could open up bunion stands all across the country.
Probably more than a few people would still be thinking the foot thing, and would be repulsed at eating a bunion, and I'd probably lose a fortune on my idea. So, it's not really worth the trouble. However, the next time you go into a restaurant and want a burger with fried onions, try asking for a bunion and see what happens.