The feet of superheroes

   When I was a boy, I had a good friend named Alexander Skolnick, and he and I used to like to invent and draw superheroes. We would almost always draw them frontally, the figures looking directly at the viewer, but with their feet facing outwards to better show the designs on their boots. I don't remember why we always drew them with boots on (as opposed to wearing shoes), but seem to recall that classic superheroes always wore them.
   One day, my father, me and Alexander were visiting at Alexander's father's country house in rural Massachusetts, when his father began berating me and Alexander for the way we depicted our characters' feet. Like my father, Arnold Skolnick was a painter, and objected to the poses in our drawings, which he felt unnatural and anatomically incorrect (they were, but we liked depicting them in this manner). After a moment or two, my father interjected, and explained why he thought we drew the feet that way, which he was correct about (to better show their boots), and which surprises me to this day that he was able to understand. It didn't occur to me consciously at the time, but thinking about it now makes it even clearer how important that interaction was for me. The memory of it remains very powerful, and I believe this is because I had the feeling of being supported by someone, and that is a feeling that I basically never had throughout my childhood, teenage years, and has persisted into much of my adult life; I still struggle to not feel that way at times currently.
   I've been thinking quite a bit over the last couple of months about how completely alone and vulnerable I felt as a child, and it took me many years to understand that in many ways, certainly emotionally, I really was alone, and that is a difficult thing for a child; at least it was for me.
   I don't have many memories of my childhood years at this time in my life, and although this fact may change, it seems that the positive ones that I do recall remain so vivid precisely because of their scarcity. The feeling of being understood and my ideas approved of is always memorable.