It was Labor Day and there were plenty of activities going on which would be fun to enjoy while wearing a cast and no foul weather to spoil the fun. Only some cloudiness was expected late in the day as a tropical storm offshore had intensified into a hurricane and would, at the very least, be spreading heavy rain and wind into the city overnight and into the next morning.

My first order of business was to do some food shopping for the upcoming week. This was always one of my favorite activities while wearing a walking cast and would require going to two stores in order to get the things I needed. Grocery stores provide an opportunity to see and be seen while still maintaining anonymity and, at the same time, performing a necessary chore. For a fancier of feet, they are superb places to obtain close, prolonged, and repetitive sightings of appealing feet, footwear, and occasionally a cast. Once a desirable subject has been identified, it is very easy to follow, meet, or even linger nearby while tending to the real or temporarily-contrived aspects of shopping. From my standpoint as recreational cast wearer, the aisles and checkout lines of a grocery store are also a veritable stage for a display performance. It allowed me to amble slowly amongst a group of people engaged in the same activity, almost all of whom would at least look at my cast. If I sensed that someone showed a particular interest in it, then it was possible to cross paths with them repetitively or to linger near them to provide a prolonged close view or even to engage in a bit of a “show” featuring various movements and changes in position of the cast as I continued my shopping activities.

The first stop of the morning was the larger of the two grocery stores which I planned to visit. My cast didn’t seem to generate any interest beyond single glances of curiosity until I had finished shopping and was walking through the parking lot to my car. It was then that I noticed someone had fallen in step slightly behind me on the left and, when I turned to look in their direction, saw a cute, blonde-haired woman about my age who was watching my cast closely as we walked. When our eyes finally met, she had brief look of embarrassment since she had been caught staring and then she smiled at me sympathetically but still maintained an interest in my cast without speaking. I turned toward my car and she crossed behind me to an adjacent row of cars and I could still see her looking at me; so I decided to see how long she would linger if I didn’t disappear quickly into the car. After unlocking my car, I then walked to the rear, opened the trunk, and spent a few moments carefully stowing my grocery bag. From the corner of my eye, I could see that she was pretending to fumble with her keys and grocery bags but was spending most of her time looking in my direction. I then walked over to the right side of the car, opened the rear door, and leaned in as though attending to something on the back seat which meant my casted left foot was easily visible to her some twenty feet away. When I glanced in her direction through the rear window, I could see that she had opened the rear door of her car and was slowly placing her groceries onto the back seat but all the while looking at me. I kept up the charade for about another minute and noticed that she had not entered her car but was still watching me as she pretended to be focused on something else; so I decided to make my move. I stepped back out of car, closed the door, and quickly turned toward her and she responded by looking away immediately. Taking a couple of steps in her direction, I called in a friendly manner, “Excuse me, do you have a piece of Kleenex or paper towel?” She stammered nervously for an instant and then replied, “Yes, I think so.” I then walked over to her and smiled, “Something in my grocery bag seems to have leaked and I need to do a little clean up.” By now we were face to face and she offered me an open box of tissues from her car and said nervously, “You never have these things when you need them.” As I took several tissues, she took the opportunity to look down at my cast and I desperately hoped that she would make a comment about it so that we could begin a conversation. “Thank you,” I said and she smiled nervously as our eyes met but she didn’t make a further comment other than a pleasant, “You’re welcome”. Disappointed, but not wanting to make her uncomfortable even though she appeared to have an interest in my cast, I smiled and returned to my car, opened the trunk, and pretended to be dealing with tidying up near my grocery bag. When I closed the trunk and looked in her direction, she still had not gotten into her car and didn’t do so until I entered mine and finally removed my cast from her view. As I drove the short distance to the next grocery store, I was thoroughly amazed that within the first twenty-four hours of wearing this cast in public I had encountered two attractive young women who found it interesting enough to actually make a concerted effort to get a good view of it. It implied to me that there may be women who find casts sexually appealing and, since women are rarely fetishists, it made me wonder whether or not some women simply found a man in a cast arousing. It was doubtful, even if I had conversed with the two women who had ogled my cast, that we would have broached this subject in casual conversation. The only hint that I ever had in this regard came from my now long-distance girlfriend who once said, “God, I think casts are neat,” as we watched a man in a walking cast pass in front of us while we were stopped at a red light. Since I never wanted the true depth of my obsession with feet and, particularly with casts, to be revealed to her, I let the comment pass knowing that I could have learned a great deal. However, I remained hopeful that someday I would learn more about this possible cast appeal in women; something which I knew was well established in men.

The smaller grocery store to which I was now heading had a few smaller stores connected to it in an L-shaped building which had a particular feature that made it a required stop for me whenever I wore a cast. Since the shops faced the south and west, the windows and doors had a reflective tinting to temper the effect of the sun and this made them absolutely spectacular for watching myself walk in a cast. I had come to know all of the places in buildings and malls where there were good reflective windows and doors and I especially knew where there were highly visible mirrors in certain department stores that I would be sure to pass whenever I wore a cast. My first stop would be at a pharmacy at the opposite end of the building from the grocery store where I could pick up some toiletry items and then I could walk back to the grocery store along the entire row of shop windows and see myself as I pretended to peer into the shops as I passed by. As soon as I stepped out from the row of parked cars I looked down at the pharmacy windows some fifty yards away I could see myself and watched my reflection grow larger as I approached the store. I had to be in control as I did this because I always found this is to be the most arousing activity surrounding public cast wearing. Seeing a good reflection of myself walking in a cast was like making a cast sighting but it became extraordinarily exciting because I could feel the cast as well as see it. This activity was the usual cause of those few instances where I had trouble concealing evidence of my arousal in public, so I always did this well prepared to place a hand in my pocket or to carry something that could be held in front of me.

I purchased a newspaper and some shaving cream at the pharmacy and then proceeded along my “wall of windows” to the grocery store where I obtained a shopping cart and headed for the produce section. As I was walking amongst the various fruit and vegetable displays, I realized how good the cast felt on my foot and how it gave me conscious pleasure with every step. Although it was only mid-morning, I was already lamenting having to remove it by the next morning, but until then I determined to continue having fun. A few minutes later, as I was slowly pushing my cart along an aisle and looking for a particular item, I noticed two young women of college age walking side-by-side pushing a cart towards me while studying their shopping list. As our carts passed, they looked at me and then must have caught sight of my cast because they both suddenly looked down at it. I continued past them by only six or eight feet and, when turning my head to survey the shelves, saw that both of them had turned around and were staring at my cast with one of them covering her mouth and whispering to the other. I simply couldn’t believe that this was a third episode of some sort of cast fascination consuming young women in this part of the city. I purposely left my cart and walked back and forth past them a couple of times to pick up some items from the shelves and place them in my cart. Still, they kept a close eye on my cast although they were trying to make their interest less obvious by acting as though they were shopping. This amused and excited me but I needed to get on with my shopping so I went on about my business and finally headed for the checkout line. There was one man ahead of me who was in the process of checking out and he took one good long look at my cast as I approached and then turned his attention back to the checker. As he was finishing his checkout, I began to place my groceries on the counter and noticed that another shopping cart had come in behind me. When I looked in that direction, I saw that it was the two young women whom I had encountered a few minutes before and they had already staked out their viewing positions. The one who had been pushing the cart was leaning forward so that she could easily see over it and the other one was standing alongside the shopping cart with one sandaled foot resting on the frame ahead of the rear wheels. I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I placed all of my items on the counter and pushed my cart through the checkout lane leaving the view of my cast unobstructed. They were to my left, so while my groceries were being rung up, I kept my weight on my right foot and extended my cast in their direction rocking it passively and changing its position to make sure that they could see it from just about every angle. Still, I was profoundly curious about how long they would continue to stare at my cast, so I purposely didn’t look directly at them but kept notice of their activity from my peripheral vision. During the entire time that I was checking out, they didn’t speak and both of them kept their eyes riveted on my cast; leading me to hypothesize that they were very interested it. To test this, I looked directly at them and smiled as I gathered up my two grocery bags and prepared to walk out. They responded with embarrassed smiles and avoided eye contact with me as they looked away sheepishly which I concluded to mean that their interest in my cast was genuine.

I remained puzzled by this apparent female preoccupation with a man in a walking cast and yearned for some unifying cause to explain it. The fact that it had occurred three times in less than a day was probably attributable to chance, but nevertheless I was curious about this phenomenon. It was no secret that there were women who understood the sensuous allure of a flawless foot and made an effort to keep their feet well groomed and, when appropriate, displayed them in revealing or otherwise “sexy” or exotic footwear. The traditional plaster walking cast certainly qualified as an example of the latter when worn on a woman’s foot, at least as far as some men were concerned, and it stood to reason that certain women would perceive a walking cast similarly regardless of the gender of the wearer. This line of reasoning made sense to me because I had made the acquaintance of an undergraduate student the previous year through a mutual friend and, during dinner one evening, she related how she found men’s feet very appealing. Furthermore, I remembered my girlfriend’s comment regarding how she regarded casts as “neat” and also recalled the time that her very attractive college roommate returned from summer vacation wearing a walking cast. Besides leaving me highly aroused whenever I saw or thought about her, my girlfriend made comments about how she liked the look of her roommate’s cast and was clearly intrigued by it. Regardless of how I tried to analyze this, any conclusions about the meaning of their fascination were purely speculative and I was simply grateful that these women I encountered had been so interested in my cast because it generated very vivid memories which I knew could be enjoyed long after the cast was gone.

By this time, I had moved into the phase when the cast begins to feel like a part of your anatomy and you are less aware of it as an extraneous object. The early anxiety of appearing in public with a physical restriction is gone; every step now feels natural and comfortable, and walking is no longer a conscious effort because the body has made the necessary postural adjustments to compensate for the inequalities of weight, position, and mobility caused by the presence of the cast on one leg. From here on, the cast could be enjoyed to its fullest and that was exactly what I intended to do. I went upstairs to put my groceries away and to have a bite to eat as well as to plan the rest of the day and spend a few moments enjoying the good memories that this cast had already delivered. Within an hour, I was out the door again and spent the next several hours browsing in an open-air art fair, having lunch at a café, and stopping by a new exhibit at the science museum; all the sort of activities I enjoyed when wearing a walking cast. I was still planning on going to the baseball game that evening, so by late afternoon I decided to return home and change into fresh clothes before going out for dinner and then the ball game. Little did I know that my plans were about to change irrevocably. As I pulled into my parking spot, one of the two people whom I knew well in the apartments spotted me and waved. She had just parked her car and was now waiting, with a grocery bag in one arm, for me to emerge from mine. I couldn’t believe it, I had finally been caught wearing a recreational cast that I had not planned to reveal to my circle of friends and associates.

Suddenly I felt quite anxious as I turned off the car and saw her waiting for me through my rearview mirror. I had become quite cavalier about wearing casts and had almost quit worrying about being discovered or even giving much thought to a plausible story of why I was wearing a walking cast. This was not a time to be nervous or ambiguous; I needed to be confident and take control of the situation and to be sure that if she saw me two days later without the cast my story was a believable one. I got out of the car, locked it, and walked toward her easily and with a smile. She saw my cast as soon as I emerged from the car and, as we walked toward one another, exclaimed, “Good Lord, what happened to you?” She kept her eyes on my cast and hugged me briefly around the waist with her free arm when we met. “I had a little mishap running and, according to the orthopaedist, I have an ankle fracture,” was my immediate reply. “Oh, that’s too bad; how long will you have to wear the cast?” Sensing this as the moment to give myself some options since she was not a medical person, I replied, “They’re going to review the X-rays and they want me to see how it feels in a couple of days. He felt it may be treatable without a cast but did this to be cautious and for my comfort.” That story wouldn’t have flown in an orthopaedics conference but I felt it served the purpose for the moment. She was now looking at me and no longer glancing down at my cast when she asked, “Are you free for dinner tonight? I just bought some very nice fresh sea bass.” I didn’t hesitate for a moment. “I’d love to; I haven’t seen you for a while and it will be nice to catch up.” I could go to a baseball game wearing a cast practically anytime I felt like it, but spending a relaxing evening in the company of woman friend while in a cast was a rare opportunity and infinitely more appealing. We started walking towards the apartment buildings and I told her, “I’ve got a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc already chilled; when would you like me to come over?” “Everything else is ready and the fish won’t take long, so come over as soon as you can,” she replied. I told her that I needed to freshen up after being out in the heat of the day and would be over in about twenty minutes.

We had been friends for over a year and would sometimes go out together frequently to movies and plays, for dinner, to art galleries, and to the beach. Then there would be periods when we wouldn’t see each other for a couple of months. We enjoyed each other’s company and were often quite romantic but we had always stopped short of becoming intimate physically. We never made demands on each other and we both knew that my stay in this city would be over in another year or so when I finished at the university and moved back home where my work would continue. This city was her home and she had returned here several years earlier to be with her mother after the death of her father. She was several years older than I and had worked for a number of years as a stewardess for a major airline and was now working in a corporate office. All of these factors seemed to coalesce into what was an unspoken understanding that our directions and commitments in life were divergent enough to make us apprehensive about the possibility of a true romance blossoming. I don’t think either of us wanted to start something that would be painful to end when I had to leave.

After shaving and cleaning up thoroughly, I put on some fresh clothes and stopped to glance in a mirror before leaving. I paused after looking down at my cast and, after a few moments contemplation, decided to do something that I had done only once before. I removed my pants and replaced them with a pair of comfortable tan shorts which displayed the entirety of my cast. The last time I had done this was one evening during my very first public wearing of recreational walking cast and had very pleasant memories of that event. This was to be a relaxing, casual evening with just the two of us and, as good friends, I felt completely at ease having her see my entire cast. Besides, she was an attractive woman and I knew that it would make me feel good just to be in her company without the cast being a focal point of our interaction. When I arrived at her door, she welcomed me with a kiss on the cheek, took the bottle of wine, and we walked together toward the kitchen. “Boy, that thing looks heavy,” she remarked after looking down at my cast, but otherwise she paid no particular attention to it nor said anything further about it. It was clear to me that she didn’t regard a cast as anything more than a medical necessity; you break your ankle, you wear a cast, and life goes on. For me, of course, wearing a cast was a secret erotic obsession which I had learned to incorporate into normal daily life, but I also had learned that there would always be surprises from this activity and now, in the setting of a relaxed dinner at the home of an attractive woman friend, I was having to control strong stirrings that I hadn’t anticipated.