Well, things are turning cold around here. So that means I need a reminder of warmth and summer. And there’s no better way that to show a strip from Red and Rover, a retro strip that looks at 11-year-old Red (Russell McLean) and his dog Rover. The strip is set in the late-1960s/early-1970s.
And that means that Red (Rover, too) was barefoot a lot.
This strip appeared on July 7, 2010. The joke doesn’t involved bare feet—they’re just part of the way things are.
Red and Rover, July 7, 2010
They are also very handy for climbing trees, though. How else are you going to get a good grip?
Ahcuah 
it is getting colder but not so cold that i would need to get out hat, gloves or even shoes. temperatures at night are freezing so i stopped sleeping with open window, only opening the window wide at least 3 times a day to let the fresh air in.
the strip reminds me of my own childhood when i would wear shoes/sandals in the street (nobody else would ever go barefoot there so it was certainly wrong, also all the kids were told to put on their shoes before going out) – but take them off to climb trees or play in the sand box. the other kids of the area did the same, so on some nice afternoons the better climbing trees had a pile of shoes and socks at their base.
the idea that i don’t even need to put on shoes ever only came to me much later ….
I’m in Edmonton now, and even though it’s been unseasonably warm here, it’s still gotten pretty cold. We pretty much have snow to stay (it’s above freezing this weekend and some of the snow already here is disappearing, but we’ve got 2-4 cm of snow coming up Monday) and I’ve given up and made myself a rudimentary pair of moccasins (wool fabric, with rubber soles and velcro – very authentic) to get myself to the bus stop and back this winter. Hopefully I won’t need them a lot, but I’m going to need them Tuesday for my dentist appointment. Winter comes early here, even compared to Montreal/Ottawa.
Also, the university has had pea-sized stones on the sidewalks since early November, because of a day where the sidewalks were frozen ice. 😦
I assume I tried climbing trees barefoot when I was a kid, but I don’t remember. Our trees weren’t much good for climbing – branches too high up. What I’d really like to see right now is autumn leaves. Right now that would be perfect.
I don’t honestly want to put on shoes, and I have made it three-four years without, but I do wonder if my going barefoot in the dead of winter puts off people by getting them to think I’m insane.
Then again, they are all pretty insane:
Note, that isn’t me saying worst flight ever, that’s the poster
If that made their worst flight ever then they’ve been awfully lucky flying. No awful delays? No person kicking the back of their seat the whole flight? Nobody overlapping their seat?
That said, you really should not put feet, bare or shod, onto armrests.
Oh, yeah, in other news, I used to climb trees barefoot all the time. I only stopped because I don’t have any nearby that are climbable.
I still do it. We have a tree with nice access in our yard, and I’ll occasionally go up there just to sit a bit and look over the neighborhood.
Here’s a picture of me (background) from when I was about 10 years old. If you look carefully you can see that I am barefoot. You might also notice that my younger brother (foreground) has shoes on (you can glimpse a bit of sock).
I wasn’t a real barefooter back then, but I guess the proclivity was showing through.
As a young boy, I stepped barefoot into a thistle in my parent’s garden. Thereafter, I did not go barefoot outside for almost 20 years, for fear of hurting myself again. So no barefoot tree climbing for me – and we had some very nice trees, too. If I remember correctly, my friends back then all wore shoes the year round, so there was no incentive to be barefoot.
It’s really unfortunate. A lot of people have an experience like that that puts them off. It’s not really the accident but the total absence of bare feet in our society combined with the belittling attitudes of shod people that make this story so common.