Foot Foot Massage

Stuck as I was, in a city of multinational citizenry, with tired, wet, cold feet, our trip to Chinatown started with a pre-dinner visit to the local accupressurist. Yes, in big cities you can find experts in Eastern medicine to soothe the savage barking our flat feet endure. Ever since watching a John Candy movie, and when I have sore feet, I always proclaim "the dogs are barkin'!" So up the stairs we went (it seems in these places, it's either up or down stairs), and I found a woman in waiting. She smiled, as if some ancient proverb had forecasted my arrival on this rainy evening. "What is your problem?" she asked me, in English, but with a heavy Chinese accent. Taken aback by such a question, I smiled, tenderly out of fear, and said, "It's my feet, the feet are my problem." I somehow felt like George Costanza telling her this. Vulnerable and stupid. "Come this way..." I walked down a hallway, and she opened a door. She asked me to take off my shoes, my socks, and to roll-up my pants. "Have you had dis done before?" "Yes," I said. "Feet, right?" she asked. "Yes." "4 minute, be ready!" She told me this, with a little bit of a command in the diction. I went to work, contemplating the joy that might follow, when the sore, inflamed dogs might be soothed by the knowledge of an Eastern master in accupressure. What I wasn't prepared for was a foot massage. Let me say that again, more precisely. A foot foot massage. That's right, my friends, a foot massage with feet. An older man came into the room, and said "Hello!" so clearly and happily that I wagered it might be the only English he knew. He sat in a chair, some distance from the table where I sat after he pulled on my arms and hands. He then motioned for me to sit up, and not to lay down. He was wearing bamboo sandals, I noticed, when he took them off, and rubbed his feet with a towel. "Hmm... my feet or yours?" I thought. My thought bubble burst when he turned around, and grabbed my feet almost violently... with his own feet. He was crafty, I'll say, cracking my feet, and finding the places that commanded attention... I giggled outloud, and he smiled at me. It was not a pleasure giggle, but one reflective of the novelty of receiving a foot foot massage. "I ought to write about this experience," I thought, as the massage continued. What struck me the most was how this man used his chair, rocking back and forth, and even on one leg, to position himself just so, to manipulate my own feet, just so. Instead of sitting, really, he used his arms to hoist himself above the seat. The massage lasted almost 30 minutes, and ended with a cool cream on my own feet--applied by hands. I wasn't sure if this massage was given by mistake (she had asked me about the feet), or this was simply de rigeur, but it was curiously just what I needed to break up a long day on my feet, before a Chinatown dinner.