Shoe-Nanigans

A retrospective on footwear, and my terror of getting them dirty.

Again - it’s amazing to me that you’re here. I’m so grateful. Truly.

This week…a little lighter fare than last week’s post :)

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Goody Two-Shoes

I kind of hate shoes.

As I write this, it’s the first week of October, which means I’m lamenting that I will soon have to wear socks again in the house, and proper footwear whenever I leave.

While others sip their pumpkin spice whatevers (I’ll still take mine black, please), for me the falling leaves are just harbingers of cold toes ahead.

Slippers are good inside the house. Sandals are good outside.

But if the weather’s nice, you’d be hard-pressed to get me to wear actual shoes outside of Sunday Mass or occasional date nights with my wife.

As I write this, I’m barefoot.

Sandals or barefoot, plus shorts and a t-shirt (though Polo shirts are acceptable), are my mode quotidienne.

Look through years of photos on my computer and that’s most likely what I’m wearing: t-shirt, shorts, and sandals (or barefoot).

Heck, I even drew myself that way in the header for this newsletter. I’m not wearing a t-shirt in the drawing just because I sort of enjoy drawing collars. We all have our things. I like to draw collars.

And before you ask, no I don’t speak French. I just looked up “daily fashion” in Google Translate because I feel like my one attempt at a fashion statement is important enough to slap some French words on it to make it more illustrious sounding.

Sort of like writing “illustrious sounding” instead of just using better.

So yeah, my summertime mode quotidienne is basically what you’d find on the discount rack at an L.L. Bean outlet store.

Contradictorily, I also have a very deeply buried anxiety within me about keeping what shoes I do have in relatively good order, and avoiding at all costs soiled, scuffed, and mud-caked footwear.

Given last week’s long-winded comparative study between childhood television viewing habits and post-traumatic stress disorder, I’ve no doubt that my foundational feelings about footwear — of both not wanting to wear shoes while at the same time worrying about scuffing them up — are most likely somehow rooted in childhood.

I don’t remember any specific moments of being scolded for dragging dirty footprints through the house, so I’m not entirely where this fear of getting my shoes dirty came from, or the fact I was always afraid my mother would discover them somehow.

My mother, you see, has always kept an immaculate house. Even now, having just hit eighty-five, my mother’s home is always dust free, vacuumed, and tidy. She wasn’t one of those people who made everyone take off their shoes upon entering the house and still isn’t. But she doesn’t like dirt, and I knew that, as a kid, I’d better clean up my messes.

Shortly after I moved to Columbus, Ohio when I was in second grade, I went walking along a nearby creek with a couple of friends. The creek ran parallel to our street, under a bridge, down in front of a few more houses, and then emptied into a long, dark tunnel that crisscrossed underneath a busy street before opening back up and flowing freely into the woods on the other side.

Kids in the neighborhood would often play at the wide, round concrete entrance of the tunnel where it was still bright with sunlight. Eventually, we’d muster up enough courage to start walking deeper into the darkness.

About halfway through the tunnel, for maybe no more than thirty feet, everything went dark as the tunnel curved in an S-shape directly under the street above.

This is where we always stopped and let the darkness become so overwhelming that one of us would eventually break ranks, turn tail, and run back screaming in the direction from whence we came, with our comrades all retreating at the rear.

One particular day, however, our bravery reached new levels.

Two friends and I had made it to the halfway point and were now entrenched in the dark. We took a step forward, with me at the lead. I felt the hands of my friends on my shoulders as I took another tentative step. My foot then firmly squished directly into a pile of muck that had gathered in the bend of the tunnel. It made a loud sucking sound when I pulled my foot back out.

“Oh man,” I said.

Then, thinking of my mother and her cleanliness, and the sure repercussions that would await my arrival home with sneakers now covered in gunk, I asked a question that was easily understandable to any kid who grew up in a home where a spatula was not just a cooking utensil, but a disciplinary tool.

“What color is your butt when you step in the mud?” I asked my friends.

To our horror, in the darkness of the tunnel, a deep voice echoed down the concrete walls. To us, it sounded like the voice was right in front of us.

“Mine’s purple,” the ominous voice said, and we all immediately started to scream and run back the other way toward the light.

We scrambled out of the tunnel and up the rocky wall that lead down to it, coming out at the curb of the street above. Looking down the road toward where we knew the exit of the tunnel was, we saw three men wearing bright orange vests — sewage maintenance workers — all laughing hysterically at us.

Combine stories like that with the fact that my father has also cared a great deal about his shoes. He traveled the country nearly every week making sales calls. On Sunday nights my mother packed his bag, and on Friday evenings he returned home with scuffs on the heels and toes.

“I’ll give you a nickel to shine my shoes,” he’d tell me.

I never got those nickels, but he taught me how to spit-shine shoes (literally showing me how to spit on his shoes as a final step, which I still think is very weird).

He had a shoebox with brown and black and burgundy polish, shammy cloths, and a fine bristle brush. I’d slip my tiny feet into his huge shoes to hold them in place as I frantically whisked the brush all over.

Years later in college, when I got a job waiting tables at a hoity-toity restaurant, at our shift meeting before lunch one day our general manager stopped in his tracks and pointed out my shoes to all the other wait staff.

“Now those are some excellently shined shoes!” he beamed.

That was my first week on the job. After a few days of spilling salad dressing and soup on that nice black leather, I gave up on that particular pair.

Apparently, long before I was born and perhaps even before my folks got married, my father supposedly worked a brief stint in a shoe store. I always assumed this is where his appreciation for shoes came from.

I don’t recall my parents doing a lot of frivolous spending when I was a kid. In fact, even with shoe purchases, I remember my mom often being overly frugal. She once bought me a blue pair of running shoes from K-Mart that I wore on an amusement park water ride. When I got home that night I discovered the wet shoes had completely dyed my feet the color of a Smurf’s. They stayed that way for the better part of a week.

But in eighth grade, I started to realize that if mom wasn’t around, Dad didn’t have a problem dropping extra money on a good pair of shoes. One Saturday morning back in the fall of 1984 I found myself in a shoe store as my dad tried on new dress shoes for work. I was eyeing a white pair of Nike Air Force One Top basketball shoes (with both laces AND a velcro strap!).

Remembering the shoes that had turned my feet blue, along with another pair that had literally come unglued and fell apart on the first day I owned them, I had zero aspirations of ever possessing such glorious footwear as those beautiful, gleamingly white Nike’s.

“You like those?” my dad asked when he came up behind me.

“Yeah, those are pretty cool.”

“Try them on.”

Whenever my mother took any of us shopping for shoes, we went through the same routine of trying them, and then she’d pinch the sides and the front of the shoe. If she couldn’t squeeze at least an inch of empty space at the toes, they’d go back in the box.

“You’ll outgrow these in a week,” she’d say.

I always assumed she learned that trick from my dad’s time in a shoe store.

That Saturday morning, my dad bent over and squeezed the toe. There was very little space left to grow. A perfect fit.

“Let’s get ‘em,” Dad said, and it took most of the rest of the day to scrape my jaw off the floor.

Even today, there have been times one of my adult sons has shown up around my dad with scuffed-up shoes and he’ll be quick to offer to take them to the store to buy them a new pair of shoes.

I just now looked up those vintage Nikes on eBay. They’re currently selling for $140. Crazy.

Even today, I hold onto my few pairs of shoes for years at a time (it also helps that I resist wearing them at all costs, which adds to their longevity).

I literally still wear shoes that are fifteen years old. The shoes I now use when I mow the grass are the same shoes I wore when I ran a marathon in 2007.

And even though I’m not a fan of wearing shoes, it’s a beautiful day outside and I just might go out on the back porch with my own cobbled-up supply of gear, my brush and shammy cloths and polish, and give my shoes a good solid shine…

…right before the weather turns and mucks them all up.

SuperHost

Last week I mentioned Marty Sullivan, aka SuperHost from Channel WUAB 43 in Cleveland. After posting, I found some archival footage of his show on YouTube, including this retrospective after he died a couple of years ago:

This one from 1986 was from a couple of years after I first discovered SuperHost (after I’d moved away), and is a good example of the weirdness I discovered that one Saturday afternoon:

And here’s his farewell broadcast in 1989:

Name Endorphins

Huge thanks to those of you who have subscribed to the newsletter this week, including two new paid subscribers - Karen and Robert!

A different Karen signed up a few weeks ago as a founding supporter. Founding supporters get to name one of the characters in my serialized novel, Eighty-Sixed.

This Friday’s chapter of Eighty-Sixed will feature two characters named by founding supporters Karen and Sally!

Final Thoughts

It’s a thrill every time I hear from one of you. Leave a comment below! Again, thanks for reading.