Buying shoes with my father in the 1950s and being embarrassed by him using 1930s shoe salesman slang.
My father had been seriously injured in an accident, resulting in problems with his legs and feet. He developed a nightly shoe ritual, which I performed kneeling on the floor. I had to unlace his shoes, remove them—gently! — loosen his socks (disgusting), put slippers on his feet, place the shoes in position to air out for 24 hours, and insert wooden shoe trees in the shoes from the previous night. I did this five days a week for how many years?
The late '50s style of dying silk shoes to match a specific dress, and then obsessing about keeping them dry so the color didn’t run.
Boots: the sensuality of showing less skin
Black vinyl high-heeled boots that ended several inches above my knees. I wore them with a hot pink mini-dress cut to the waist in front and back. Totally trashy '60s manbait.
My favorite boots ever were black cowgirl boots with red and white stitching, until I sprained my ankle and had to walk a mile in them. I never wore them again.
The boots I lost at Tai Chi last winter were old and beat up. In fact, I had planned to replace them. But once gone, they became irreplaceable. No other boots can match their comfort and function.
Now I have duct tape on the toes of my Muck boots. It’s really ugly, but no one will mistake my boots for theirs.
Aurora Shoes: made only a few miles from here, are what I live in now
Going with my daughter to the barn/factory outside of Aurora to buy “seconds” of Aurora Shoes. Cats wound around our legs and we grew drunk on the smell of leather. Later we had lunch at the Aurora Inn, looking at the sailboats on the lake, pretending we were ladies, which we weren’t, out for a perfect fall afternoon, which it was.
Getting dressed in semi-darkness on a gloomy winter day and discovering, several hours after I got to work, that I was wearing one brown Aurora shoe and one black. It made my day.
Having my favorite pair of Aurora shoes resoled and resurrected — pure joy.
