Shoe Story
Ah, it’s a tale both horrifying and heartwarming…Do you have a favorite pair of shoes? I do ~ my Fly Flot sneaker mules from Italy. They are SO comfortable and very hard to find in the USA.
Today as I write this my shoes are sitting in the trash.
Why, you ask, are they in the trash? Well, that’s thanks to Ming, our Himalayan rescue cat. Ming has recently taken to hiding in our closet. She’s very good at it. Even though I know she’s probably in there I can’t find her when I try to shoo her out before bed. Then, in the morning you open the closet door and she comes whipping out. We went through this last week and while she was trapped in the closet overnight she needed to relieve herself. My Fly Flot shoes were her litter box replacement of choice! I could smell as soon as I opened the closet she’d peed in there but the light is on the fritz and it was blinking and dim and I couldn’t see where. I stuck my foot into my shoe, planning to go out in the garage and get a flashlight and… it was wet! More than once the cat targeted my husband’s shoes, leaving dead or nearly-dead mice inside them. I think I would rather have that since it doesn’t smell as bad! I washed and washed my shoes but the smell just would not come out so I ended up throwing them away.
Life is kind of revolving around shoes here, lately. I am in the middle of a months-long project listing doll shoes. I got a huge tub of Barbie and similar dolls and accessories and there are many, many shoes in the mix. A lot of them are unsold deadstock, evidently straight from the factory and never packaged. I’ve been researching them and listing them for sale with the Mattel item number whenever possible so collectors can complete their outfits with the proper shoes. So if Barbie’s your jam check it out here.
Then there’s our track star. He’s 15 and growing like a weed. It seems like he outgrows his running shoes every week. So my shops are also getting full of barely-worn, very expensive athletic shoes. One pair of Nikes is still new because he outgrew those before he ever wore them! If you’re in need of men’s running shoes you’ll want to look here.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful we can provide these shoes for him, but I do wish I could slow time down just a little bit! Shoes have a special place in our family. My great-grandfather came to America from Norway when he was 17, speaking no English and penniless. He found work as a sailor on Lake Michigan and worked all the way up to First Mate when he was struck by polio and paralyzed. My grandfather could remember riding piggyback around the yard one day and then his dad unable to walk the next. After that great-grandpa became a shoe salesman. He wasn’t very good at it and they had 8 kids so they were very poor.
My grandfather grew up and went to visit Norway in 1980. His own father had never returned or saw his parents or siblings who stayed there again. Grandpa was surprised when he arrived to meet a cousin he’d never heard of and find out he had an aunt no one ever mentioned. It seems his cousin, Anna, was born out of wedlock. In Norway that’s no big deal (traditionally once a couple became engaged they slept in the same bed with a ribbon dividing the two halves) but in America at the turn of the 20th Century it was a scandal, so my great-grandfather just never mentioned he had a sister and niece.
It turns out he never forgot them, however. When Anna, by then a very old woman, met my grandfather she started to cry. She explained his father had sent her shoes all through her childhood because her family was too poor to buy them. She told him she could still remember the fin skoen (“fine shoes”) he sent her. So, Great-Grandfather, despite being so poor people left bags of food on the doorstep, sent shoes to Norway for the rest of his life unbeknownst to anyone in the family to the niece no one knew existed.
It’s hard to imagine our abundance compared to the lifestyle most people had just a couple generations ago. We are truly blessed, even if sometimes we stick our foot into a wet-with-WHAT shoe!
My grandfather grew up and went to visit Norway in 1980. His own father had never returned or saw his parents or siblings who stayed there again. Grandpa was surprised when he arrived to meet a cousin he’d never heard of and find out he had an aunt no one ever mentioned. It seems his cousin, Anna, was born out of wedlock. In Norway that’s no big deal (traditionally once a couple became engaged they slept in the same bed with a ribbon dividing the two halves) but in America at the turn of the 20th Century it was a scandal, so my great-grandfather just never mentioned he had a sister and niece.
It turns out he never forgot them, however. When Anna, by then a very old woman, met my grandfather she started to cry. She explained his father had sent her shoes all through her childhood because her family was too poor to buy them. She told him she could still remember the fin skoen (“fine shoes”) he sent her. So, Great-Grandfather, despite being so poor people left bags of food on the doorstep, sent shoes to Norway for the rest of his life unbeknownst to anyone in the family to the niece no one knew existed.
It’s hard to imagine our abundance compared to the lifestyle most people had just a couple generations ago. We are truly blessed, even if sometimes we stick our foot into a wet-with-WHAT shoe!
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