Foot Envy

NYT this morning introduces a new hominum with an opposing big toe. Found in Ethiopia near where Lucy was found, they lived between three and four million years ago, contemporary with Lucy perhaps, but like Ardi man they were suited to moving and living in trees.

When I was a boy dense forest covered the entire Cove area of Panama City with tall trees and thick brush. In some places around our neighborhood there were no roads, only a few well worn footpaths that at least my imagination knew had been travelled by an earlier race long ages before. For a boy like me who loved climbing trees, having four hands instead of two hands and two feet would have been just the thing.

My father built us a -- we called it a tree house but it was actually a platform -- in the chinkapin trees in our back yard. Long gone, they were where the carport was built about 1948 because we had a new car that my mother didn’t want ruined sitting under the pine trees as the car before it had been. A chinkapin tree is obnoxious for barefooted boys,

because the burrs harden, drop to the ground and become like large sandspurs, stickers, painful to step on. With two more hands instead of feet life would have been more pleasant in the summertime, because I would not have come down from the trees.

It would have made picking up scallops in St. Andrews Bay much easier too.