Shoes

SHOES
Bill Flynn

Do you remember when you were a kid and shoes were a hassle? At least that was the way it was for me. I was always looking around the house to find them. The sock draw was a common drawer and only God knew what you might find in terms of a matching pair. I had very low standards in what I considered to be a matching pair. Basically, if the colors were close at all, it was a pair.

I remember on any number of occasions when I did my own little repair on a worn out pair of shoes. In order to fix a hole in the sole I would cut out a piece of cardboard to fit and go on my merry way. I know I’m not the only one to apply this therapy. I suspect most of the older crowd did the same thing. New shoes had the to wait a paycheck or two sometimes so you learned to make due.

Linda tells me she did the same thing and being a girl who cared about her appearance was mortified when after going to communion her friends were kidding her about having Tony the Tiger in her shoe. She says she showed them. She’s not a tiger anymore, she’s grew up and now she’s a cougar.

Actually, Uncle Eddie had a little repair shop in the basement and often made repairs to our shoes. He would glue flapping soles and put lifts on the heels. We called them taps and thought we were cool. Not to get sidetracked he also did haircuts. I’ve got to tell you this one. My brother Pat had light blond hair when we were eight or nine years old. I always had a dark thick mop and by comparison his looked scrawny. One Saturday afternoon Uncle Eddie and my father were doing a little celebrating and decided that in order to thicken up Pat’s hair they would shave his head. There was an old wives tale that said that if you shaved a head the hair would grow back thicker. So off it came. Pat survived during the day by wearing a little skull cap that Danny Mason, who was a Christian Brother at the time, gave him. It looked like a yarmulke and brought along its own special kidding. Every night my father would come in from the oil yard and heat up a little plate of olive oil. He would proceed to massage my brother’s head. We can’t say for sure, but this might have actually worked. Pat had a good head of hair.

Sneakers were a big deal. Not like Air Jordans today but none the less a bit of a status symbol. The elite sneakers were Converse. I can still here it today “You don’t slip and slide in the shoes with the stars on the side.” Of course I got to see them from afar. We were the cheaper PF Fliers people all the way. Hang your head and go sit on the bench. I survived and was vindicated when the Duncan YoYo man showed up with PF Fliers on and put on his YoYo wizardry show. Now who is cool.

Another battle I lost was my quest for a pair of Tom McCann Snap Jack shoes. These were the coolest and I had to have them. The big feature was a tongue that snapped into place where the laces would normally be. The only tongue that snapped into place was Mom’s when she delivered her final no. She said if I kept it up the old shoes were going down to Uncle Eddie and he would fix them and there would be no new shoes. Whoops, almost blew it. Honestly, I don’t remember what I wound up with but it was better than what I had. I told this story to a good buddy of mine and he said he went through the same deal and he never got them either. 60 years later, it finally eased my pain.

When we actually went to buy shoes, it was not unusual to wind up in Alexander’s Department Store on Fordham Rd. When you went in the Creston Ave. entrance to the store you had to walk through the children’s shoe department. A salesmen would size your foot with what looked like an adjustable Martians boot and then bring out shoes to try on. When you settled on a pair of shoes he would take you over to the Fluoroscope machine where you stood at a podium and slid your feet into a box at the base. He then turned on what was an x-ray machine and he and my mother looked through viewers where they could see your feet inside the shoes and determine if they fit. No problem there. Today the technicians who use similar machines go in another room and wrap you in lead. Add it to the list of the “how did we survives.” I thought that maybe I imagined this machine but I was watching American Restoration one evening and there it was being featured as one of the repairs on the show.

What prompted me to start writing about shoes was the story my mother told about walking to school from the family farm, Tour, I believe. She said that a group of children went to a school that was located three miles away from the farm off of the hilltop that they lived on. What struck me about the story was that they tied their shoes around their necks as they walked to and from school. When they got to school they put their shoes on. They didn’t want to be seen as bumpkins without shoes at school but they also knew that they had to preserve the shoes as best they could. They too knew that there could be a wait when it was time for a new pair. This common sense frugality served my mother and father well throughout their lives and it spread to their children. The reward for our humble beginnings stays with me everyday. I live in circumstances that few people would be unhappy with. I have more shoes than I will ever need and I appreciate every good thing that I have in my life. That includes my cougar.