What is the worst gift you have ever received? (And no bad stories about fruitcakes from your aged aunt.)
In my case it is not hard to recall the worst gift I ever received, which I got from my wife (don’t worry, she already knows), for reasons which will soon become apparent.
The gift was a Father’s Day present. Maybe we all give those gifts that we would like to receive ourselves, but I know my wife to be a truly inspired gift giver. She is thoughtful, to begin with, which generally explains her success and my lack of it. She collects things all year and keeps them in separate shopping bags in the back of the closet for children’s birthdays, best friends’ anniversaries and Christmas. Please! I am still trying to recover.
But on the occasion of Father’s Day a year and a half ago, my wife gave me the gift of a pedicure. I was stunned. True, our dog has had a pedicure of sorts—but that was at the vet. And our cats have had to have their claws trimmed to preserve the furniture, so my first thought was that my turning over in bed at night was perhaps my original sin. I immediately visualized the prehensile feet of the three-toed sloth, which I had seen once in the rainforest, and thought this was a pretty harsh message to be delivering to a father of the children. But maybe it really was an innocent gift. Maybe I would actually like something I had never tried before.
So I feigned pleasure and went dutifully off to the pleasure dome where women go to have these things done. I checked in with the receptionist in the waiting room and was shown into the back room where someone who apparently went to high school with my youngest child greeted me cheerfully. I like cheerful. I can do this, I said to myself.
But when I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my pants legs as instructed, a look of”¦well, equal measures of concern, shock and despair crossed her countenance. “Oh my,” she said, “What have you done to your feet?” I should have recognized in that moment this encounter was headed downhill. I told her I was a runner, which is true, and that I had been running pretty much every day for the past 40 years. I thought this might be something to be proud of, but then you have not seen the wide eyed innocence in the eyes of my pedicurist turn into a narrowly determined gaze as she inspected what I learned were the most calloused, misshapen and abused appendages she had witnessed in her sweet, short life. Nevertheless, she was up to the challenge and energetically filled the foot tub with soothing warm water to soak my feet to soften them up. This was followed by a foot massage with oils that would make a French courtesan blush, and I began to relax. This was not going to be so bad, after all. Of course, these initiation rites lasted less than two minutes and there were still 58 minutes to go.
My wife disputes this; she insists the appointment was only 30 minutes long; but I swear it was an hour, as I logged each passing minute, then each half-minute and finally each second deep into the hippocampus where long-term memories are stored.
The pedicurist next brought out a tool that looked like something I had seen in interviews with trainers before the Kentucky Derby: an industrial sized cheese grater on a long handle for scraping off horse hooves, which, if you have abused your feet for four decades, I can tell you takes some real elbow grease. With each pass over the back edge of the heel and then to the large toe joint, not to mention the fronts of the toes and the balls of the feet, I suddenly understood the full meaning of the pain-pleasure continuum. The feeling was so intense, so unlike anything I had ever felt in my life, I had no category into which to assign the flood of sensations that left me alternately gasping, laughing uncontrollably and screaming out loud.
Flash here in your mind, for those old enough to remember, to the scene in the appropriately named movie, “Marathon Man,” which has little to do with running, but is probably the quintessential torture film in which Sir Lawrence Olivier, a war criminal, uses a dentist’s drill to draw out a secret he believes the unwitting Dustin Hoffman will reveal by drilling down into the cortex of his tooth nerve with a high-pitched rotating instrument. I was Dustin Hoffman and I swear I detected a demonic gleam in my pedicurist’s eye.
After she was finished with the industrial-sized horse file, she told me she would next trim my nails, which I suspected was the original intent of the gift. This is it, I thought; after this I will hobble out of here, a broken man.
Out came a set of clippers, which in my minds eye were as long as a set of garden shears with handle extensions on which I imagined she would stand to make me confess my worst secrets. This is when she discovered that her patient, I don’t think I would qualify as a client—had an ingrown toenail. But she was there to help! She brought out a special set of tools that Olivier would have envied. They were silver handled jobs with blades and gougers of various shapes and sizes, depending on the perfidy of the sinner, and soon thereafter the session devolved into that which I had feared in that most primitive reptilian part of my brain.
I simply don’t remember what happened next, since I must have passed out, but my wife, who had stopped by to check up on me, heard me in the waiting room. Later she told me that when she came in, hoping to find a beatific scene of gauzy, soporific pleasure, she found a wild-eyed man who vaguely resembled her husband who was sweating so profusely the now completely non-plussed pedicurist had wrapped towels around his shoulders and head to keep from dripping on her.
When I was finally allowed to leave, the receptionist looked at me crossing the empty waiting room with an intensity that gave me every reason to believe I had scared off any client who might have been waiting for their turn to share my experience.
I now have another primal fear: turning over at night and being sent to the horse trainers again.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.