The Foot on the Cover

When I limped from my car into the house after my podiatrist appointment, I was greeted by a blast of welcome air conditioning and a stack of mail on the sideboard. Sitting on top: The New Yorker, with an illustrated foot standing front and center on the fanciful cover, complete with miniature flowers and smiling butterflies flitting around a field of grass. (Here's a link to the magazine cover. Conde Nast charges $150 to use the cover image so you need to click to see the big beautiful foot yourself.)

Ugh, really? The irony! I thought. But then I paused. Was seeing a cover of a big beautiful foot just after learning I had broken my metatarsal true irony? Or was it just a more pedestrian (sorry) coincidence?

We frequently misuse “irony” versus “coincidence,” because their meanings are so similar. Was it ironic to view the brightly drawn foot upon my return from the podiatrist? Or mere coincidence?

The Road to the Podiatrist

I had finally gone to get my foot looked at after I had put it off for weeks—months, actually. I kept thinking what I thought was a sprained toe would heal on its own, and I was annoyed by my health plan’s requirement to see my primary care doc for a referral. It was my silent protest against the healthcare system. I’d show them this step was needless!

Meanwhile, my fourth toe remained swollen, and I couldn’t walk normally. Every so often, I’d step, twist, or lean wrong and a sharp pain would shoot through the top of my foot toward my ankle. Every morning, I wrapped circles of sticky gauze over and around my foot. Sometimes I’d switch to a compression sock I folded back on itself, a process I designed to retrofit a heel support into a front-of-the-foot support. The toe liked to be wrapped tightly.

My procrastination had crossed over into the absurd, as a friend told me over draughts of cider one hot afternoon. She had her own foot problems and told me to get off my high horse and go to the podiatrist.

The tech took three shots of my foot in the x-ray machine. It took less than five minutes for the doctor to return and tell me I had a break in my metatarsal—where my fourth little piggy connects to the rest of my foot. It was the metatarsophalangeal joint. That may be the longest word I have ever typed.

“While I wish I could say I was skydiving and landed wrong,” I said in the exam room, “I kicked the bed.”

“You kicked the bed,” the doctor said, nodding, typing a note into his iPad.

He said that while my metatarsal was starting to heal, I should start the buddy system—taping my third toe to my injured fourth with sticky gauze. (I just knew they were buddies! They had spent much time nestled together in so many socks). He also sold me a cast shoe. While the shoe is black, wide, unashamedly Velcro strapped, and uber manly, it houses my foot in a solid frame. No wiggling and, importantly, much less pain. I should heal in about six weeks.

So Was it Irony or Coincidence?

I continue to gaze at The New Yorker’s Big Foot cover. Irony was not the right word here.

“An old man turned 98. He won the lottery and died the next day. It’s like a black fly in your Chardonnay,” sings Alanis Morissette on her 1995 hit song, “Isn’t it Ironic?”

Actually, no. The lottery winner dying the next day is sad. The fly floating in your drink is bothersome. But those things don’t represent irony (even though the lyrics are superb).

Many writers reach for the word “ironic” because it’s a rich and clever adjective, but it’s only correct when the coincidence is both unexpected and oppositional.

For my moment with the pile of mail to be truly ironic, the two events—foot break, seeing the foot-on-magazine cover—would need to be a full 180 degrees from what I expected to happen. Like a marriage counselor announcing she had just received divorce papers from her husband at the end of a couple’s session. Or my podiatrist going home that day and kicking his bed and breaking one of his metatarsals. Those situations are ironic because of the jobs they hold and what happened to them.

My seeing the New Yorker cover that afternoon was a coincidence. The root of the word is “coincide.” My receiving a diagnosis of a foot fracture coincided with receiving a magazine featuring a carefree foot on its cover.

I was vaguely disappointed. The timing was so wryly perfect, me stomping inside with my brand-new man shoe and there’s the cover, the first thing I see. While not ironic, it still seemed to be more than run-of-the-mill coincidence.

I consulted the internet and found the word synchronicity. Pairing the magazine foot against my literal foot in the span of 15 minutes was synchronicity—when two unrelated events occur simultaneously, or in close sequence, and seem to be connected.

So while the magazine cover wasn’t ironic, it was a special kind of coincidence—an unusually well-timed one that I’ll chalk up to synchronicity.