My two favorite people: Ace and Deuce.

Growing up, grocery store feet to me were like “hard-core pornography” was to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who remarked “I know it when I see it.” I loved to get grocery store feet and I knew exactly what they looked like, but I never knew they had a name. Mama just told me my feet looked crusty while Granny Wham would scrub at them for half an hour before giving up and letting me put those blackened feet between her pristine white sheets.

Then, I met a beautiful, fabulously interesting and talented young lady named Laura Davis (Now Laura Davis Hall). In the intervening years, Laura has become the nearest thing I’ve ever had and ever will have on this earth to a sister. Our lives have much in common including growing up children of divorces in tiny Southern towns with an inveterate love of hearing, telling, and retelling stories.

In the course of a story telling session one night over supper at some restaurant with Budge and I, Laura remarked that wearing Crocs had given me “grocery store feet.” Well, with those three words, she gave a definition to what I’d known about all my life, but never could name. I’d been toying with the idea of starting a blog for several months but I wanted a really good name. Since I was a librarian and a technology contact person at the time, I thought “Books, Bytes, and Grocery Store Feet” was about the coolest name I’d ever heard. I ran with that name until I lost my job as a librarian. Once I was unemployed, I dropped “Books and Bytes” and added “Granny Beads.”

So, “Grocery Store Feet” is not a creation of my own. I am merely holding the name / term in trust against the day when Laura writes her own future bestselling Southern novel entitled Kool-Aid Smiles and Grocery Store Feet: Growing up a Ware Shoals Girl. I am indebted to Laura for the name and this page serves as her citation and thanks 🙂