Personal Response to Family of Little Feet Essay

The beginning of the story starts out sounding like a fairytale about a family with little feet and then transforms into a story that is being told about a little girl and two of her friends that are given three pairs of high heeled shoes to play with, â€Å"†¦. magic high heels†. The girls each try on and swap between them the three pairs of shoes and then begin walking about the neighborhood with the shoes on and the speaker notes the different reactions that they receive from the different people they pass while wearing the shoes. The speaker states â€Å"Down to the corner where the men can’t take their eyes off us. We must be Christmas†. They pass a shop keeper that asks them if their mother knows they have shoes like that, and he tells them they are too young to be wearing them. Then the girls pass the laundromat where six female cousins just ignore them as they walk by in the high heels, and one of the girls named Lucy states that the cousins are always jealous. Lastly they pass a tavern where one of the girls, Rachel yells out to the bum that is standing out front, â€Å"Do you like these shoes?† The bum answers â€Å"yes† to Rachel and he asks her name in which she replies â€Å"Rachel†. The bum tells Rachel how pretty she is and that her shoes are beautiful. He proceeds to tell Rachel â€Å"Rachel, you are prettier than a yellow taxi cab. You know that†? The other little girl Lucy, seemingly knowing better, doesn’t like this encounter with the bum and tells her friend that â€Å"we got to go†. The bum then offers Rachel a dollar for a kiss which she seems to be considering until her friend Lucy grabs her by the hand and begins to run from the bum, all the while he is still yelling something that the girls aren’t close enough to hear any longer. This obviously scared, at the very least Lucy because the next paragraph begins â€Å"We are tired of being beautiful†. Lucy hid the shoes and then one day her mother was cleaning and threw them away but â€Å"no one complains†. By the way no one complains when the shoes are thrown away shows that the girls have had their first real encounter with the mature world awaiting them, and they are not yet ready to enter it at their young ages.