It’s just genes, two different specialists explained. Genes that pulled at my heel and twisted my foot and flattened my arch over six decades. “Your calves are a beast,” the surgeon said, not referring to size or strength (sadly), but to pulling power. Fixing the foot, they promised, would allow me to walk and hike and travel for the rest of my life, whereas I had arrived at the point of no longer being able to walk for exercise. Sitting in the consult chair, I remembered Dad grimacing and clinging to his walker handles, sliding his deformed feet along, his ankle bones on the floor. “Let’s do it,” I said, and scheduled the surgery. Jeanette flew up for five days to take care of me, and, especially important, to take care of Mom. I would be either in my bed or in my office recliner, my foot above my heart, for a month, and no weight-bearing for two. “I want to see Roger,” clamored Mom the day I came home from the hospital. “I want to give him a massage.” Jeanette had gently suggested to Mom that “Roger will not want a massage.” A massage? Mom can still surprise me, apparently. Just where did the massage idea come from? And where did she imagine she would massage me? Not my sutured foot, certainly. My good foot? My bare knees? My bald head? The thought was too weird to study seriously. During her first short visit to my room, she stood over my feet with her fingers wiggling eagerly in the air, and I nearly screamed, “Don’t touch my foot!” She wasn’t going to massage me, of course, or even touch me. She was just sending me a little old-mother love through her wiggling fingertips.