Shoe memories

Recently, my mother told me that she had boxed up my dad's shoes and was giving them to an organization that was collecting shoes for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. My dad would have liked that.


In running around inside the tangled web that is my brain, I started thinking about my dad's shoes. He didn't have a lot of shoes. He always said he didn't need them. In other words, he was not Imelda Marcus's lost twin. He liked his hush puppies, a good pair of slippers and his cowboy boots. And if he had found them at the salvation army....all the better.


He also had a strange love affair with glue products and his shoes. I am a firm believer that if the sole is removing itself from the rest of your shoe, then it is time to hit the mall. Dad gave his shoes a second life with gorilla glue or super glue or even epoxy. Even hitting his shoe with a running chainsaw didn't banish the shoes to the waste bin. That was a chance for a story and Dad couldn't give up that chance. He loved telling me the story about how the crack in his pair of .50 cent hush puppies came from the chainsaw and how he sloshed around in the blood inside his shoe while he finished the job. I am all for a good story,but.......


Dad also loved his slippers. He had a couple pairs over the years. He would never put his feet all the way into the shoes and over time the back heel was so worn down the slippers took on more of a clog style. Have you ever had a sound in your life that you know by heart? You can recognize it from a mile away and still hear it years later. My dad's slippers scuffing along the Mexican tile downstairs as he added wood to the stove in the winter time was one of those sounds for me. I always felt safe when I heard that sound. It was the sound of warmth and safety. The sound of a man who loved his family.


But if there was a pair of shoes that was my dad, they would be his cowboy boots. I have this clear memory from when I was about 15 of my dad riding one of our horses at a full gallop down our dirt driveway and seeing those cowboy boots hitched in the stirrups. That day, there was no truer cowboy.

My dad always really took good care of his shoes. There was a wooden box in our house that held a pile of greasy rags and kiwi shoe polish. It had the look of something that had been around the block a couple of times. There was a wooden heel stop which you could use to help you pull your boots off. My dad would pull out that box and sit down for a massage session. He would turn on a football game, open a can of polish, dig into it with one of the greasy rags and get to work rubbing. As simple and plain of a task that it was, I could see how it would bring one a great deal of joy and comfort. Just thinking about it now, brings me those emotions years later.

It has been said that actions speak louder than words. When I was right out of college, I took an internship at Longwood Gardens as an Arboriculture Intern. I had to buy a pair of leather work boots with steel toes for the job. My dad worked with a lot of electrical lineman in his job with the utilities and he took me to the store where the lineman bought their shoes. The boots we bought were lace up, brown, leather boots. Very simple, ugly and so not in the realm of Jimmy Choo. The shoes alone made question my choice of internship, never mind my intense fear of heights. We brought the shoes home and dad got to work. He would add a layer of polish and then sit the shoes by the wood stove to help the polish melt into the leather. And then add another round. And another. He kept telling me that the softer the leather got, the nicer the shoes would be to wear. I left a couple weeks later for my internship and during those long nine months, I learned a lot. I learned about trees, how to care for them, and that in the end, I was not meant to be an arborist. Looking back on it now, I also learned that one of the best things a parent can do is let us try something new, no matter how scary and support us in whatever way possible. Dad never told me not to climb those trees or to be careful. He knew I had to do it and learn, but he still made sure I put my best foot forward.

So, as my dad's shoes make their way to Haiti, it makes me smile to see my dad's love spread around the world.