Why is it that a woman sitting in a skirt with her legs crossed, precariously dangling a designer pump from her toe-tips, can keep me mesmerized for what has to be an unhealthy amount of time? There’s something about a delicate, perfectly arched foot cradling a red pump that sends my most dormant of hormones into an adolescent tizzy. Men could never pull this off. A guy dangling a wingtip from a foot draped in argyle has no aesthetic appeal whatsoever. Thermal socks and construction boots? An Air Jordan and an immaculately white pair of tube socks pulled up to the knees like Michael Cooper? Nu-uh.

I feel that this little game between foot and shoe carries with it a tantalizing aura of beauty. It’s perfect in its imperfection. What I mean is, a shoe is meant to cover the foot; it is meant to be worn. No one designs a shoe preoccupied with the thought of how it is going to look dangling from the end of a woman’s foot. There’s absolutely no utility in the cross-legged dangle, and yet I feel compelled to compare it to a work of art. I mean, I dig the drawings of Matisse. In fact, I have a print of his Study of A Model in my bedroom. There’s just something about it that injects solitary moments of contentment into my life. But if you were to put me in a room and tell me that I have to choose between spending an hour looking at a Matisse or an hour watching the cross-legged dangle, well…I think you know which way I’m going to go.

I used to wonder if women were aware of what they were doing when they played this little game. Were they aware that men watched this whole act with a keen and concentrated eye? Years ago, a trio of men and I stood by distracted and breathless as we watched a young woman sitting at a picnic table rhythmically do the cross-legged dangle. Like babies watching a musical mobile, we were entranced. I’m sure some of us were even drooling like babies. That’s what that little act can do to us. One of the guys later said that this woman knew we were watching all along and that the whole shoe dangling performance was just a deliberate attempt to turn us on. To which I replied, “Who cares?”

When I was fifteen I wanted to marry every woman who made even the slightest beautiful gesture. That included everything from using a napkin to lightly pat the perspiration from her neck and arms to gently pushing her wind tousled hair from her face. Tiny gestures such as those and I was envisioning what our kids would look like and in what quiet little hamlet our dream house would be. I don’t think like that kid anymore. I now know the beauty of sturdy relationships, of accustomed but beloved gestures, of spontaneity combined with familiarity. But that doesn’t mean that I can no longer recognize the beauty of those tiny gestures. I’m still gotten by the pat of perspiration and the brush of tousled hair. And I can still be drawn in for moments at a time by that lovely dangling shoe.