© Ruth Sims 2010
Shoe Tales
I’m not a particularly good housekeeper. Not the world’s worst (I’ll never be on “Hoarders” unless they check the amount of email I have piled up) but I’m not obsessively tidy, either. I have dust. I have dust bunnies so old and large they have social security numbers and their own zip code.
So it is, that when I get started cleaning closets it’s one of favorite things; every mysterious box is like Christmas morning or Forrest Gump’s chocolates: I never know what I’ll get since I didn’t have brains enough to label the box.
The other day I found a large box of shoes. Four pairs of special shoes.
Three of them were high-topped baby shoes, the ones for babies just learning to self-navigate. If you ever want a definition of “wonder” look at the face of any baby discovering for the first time that she can get from Here to There, that if she can get upright, hang on to something or someone, weave back and forth a few times, move Part A, and then move Part B in the same general direction, she can move! Her eyes light up, her mouth (usually dripping drool) drops open, showing a coupe of tiny pearly whites, and a sound emits that, with good reason, is described as “crowing.” Do it again! Move part A, move Part B. The next step is usually a splat right on the bum, followed by doing it all over again. And again. In an unbelievably short time, Baby has been left behind forever, having turned into Toddler. And the next thing Dad knows, the Toddler is asking to borrow the car keys and applying for college.
The smallest pair of shoes in the box were mine. Mom had filled them with plaster of Paris, tied the laces, and painted them white. I weighed less that five pounds when I was born at home, and always had smaller than average feet. Mom said that I walked and talked late, but when I talked I talked in sentences. And she said I never crawled. One day I simply walked. My shoes are worn a little on the bottom, and the white paint is cracked.
The largest pair belonged to my son. He, too, walked late. And because he crawled for a long time (at least it seemed like a long time) his shoes are badly scuffed on the toe. I feel guilty that I didn’t go the plaster of Paris route. It’s not too late. He walked when he was past a year old but fell down all the time. He was my first; I thought all toddlers fell down all the time. Come to find out when he was three, he fell because he was seeing double because of lazy eye blindness. Eventually his lazy eye lost nearly off of its sight. The hardest thing I had to do as a Mom was let him play sports because of the possibility of eye injury to his good eye. I wanted to forbid it, but I didn’t want him to grow up thinking of himself as handicapped or become obsessed with worry. I did that enough for both of us. I still do, though he's a middle-aged man now.
The middle-sized pair belonged to my daughter. She was our whiz-bang, our firecracker, our unstoppable and unsinkable Molly Brown. Once she discovered crawling, she was never still. And when she discovered walking she was never in one place more than a moment. I think her predominate genes are the Perpetual Motion gene and the Missouri Mule Stubborn gene. Her shoes are only slightly worn on the toes, more so on the sole.
The fourth pair were my wedding shoes. Size five, open-toe, sling-backs. Three-and-a-half inch heels (agony! But worth it.) The see-through heels had little stars carved in them, and the front part was see-through also. (Incidentally, two things prove women are tougher than men: childbirth and high heels.) I loved those shoes in spite of the pain inflicted. And now, a half-century later, high heels are just a fond (if painful) memory. Because of multiple foot problems plus diabetes, I’m doomed to wear expensive granny shoes with orthotics. I’ll never wear pretty shoes again.
My Spousal Unit suggested we throw the box and shoes away, since we were decluttering.
He stared dumbfounded when I burst into tears.
