Worn Stories: One Shoe Can Change Your Life (Cinderella)

It is raining today, so I slip on my rain boots as I head out the door to run errands. My Wellibob boots have bright yellow soles and are covered with black metallic flies. I’m almost glad that it’s raining today because I feel ready to splash through puddles and take on the world in these boots.

I know from experience that one shoe can indeed change your life.

Every August when I was a kid, my mother would pile my siblings and me into the station wagon and drive us to the shoe store in the neighboring town. The owner would fit each of us with a pair of shoes.

Shoes during this time were made of leather and built to last. Growing up, our shoes were intended to see us through the entire school year. The tops may have gotten scuffed from dragging our toes to slow down the swing, and the laces may have needed replacing along the way, but they lasted through the school year.

However, the summer when I was going into the seventh grade, synthetic shoes made their appearance in our local shoe store. I vaguely remember the owner telling my mother that the pair I had selected wouldn’t hold up as well as the leather shoes. At the time it didn’t matter and I begged my mother to let me buy them.

I was quite happy with my new shoes…until partway through the school year when a hole appeared in the top of my right shoe. This was quickly followed by a hole in my left shoe.

Seventh grade felt like torture on a good day. And there I was, every day, walking down the hall, sitting through my classes, going to the lunchroom with my socks poking out through the holes in my shoes.

There was not enough money for new shoes. I’m sure my parents had struggled to scrape enough money together to buy the five of us shoes back in August.
As much as I wanted to, I didn’t press and beg my parents for a new pair of shoes. I knew that they just didn’t have the money.

One Sunday morning, a month or so after the holes appeared, my dad asked me to bring him my shoes. He took out his epoxy resin, and as I pushed the sides of the shoes to close the hole, my dad applied the resin. You could still see where the hole had been, but my socks no longer protruded through the openings.

I didn’t mind my shoes as much after we patched them. Oddly enough, I was proud of my shoes. Of course, I would have much rather had a new pair. However, gluing the shoes was a good lesson in creative problem-solving. I also felt a rush of empowerment, something my seventh-grade self desperately needed.

Manolo Blahnik said that “Shoes are the quickest way for women to achieve instant metamorphosis.” Those brown shoes did transform my life, but I’m sure it wasn’t in the way that Blahnik intended.

I could have easily fallen into the trap of defining myself by my ugly, brown deformed shoes. Instead, I allowed my innate strength as a problem solver to emerge. A skill that I continued to nurture.

Alyssa Siegel in her article Shoe Obsession: Women and Their Shoes, writes that “Perhaps I wouldn’t die if I had to wear the same drab pair of shoes for the rest of my life but some part of me would wilt and fade.”

I might have wilted and faded if my dad hadn’t taught me how to repair the holes in my shoes. Because of my seventh-grade experience, the thought of wearing the same drab pair of shoes for the rest of my life is way down on my list of life’s sufferings.

Still, there is something magical about slipping into a pair of favorite shoes. And what will I do if something happens to my much-loved pair of red, lace-up leather boots? And I discover that they have stopped making them? I’m fairly certain that I can find a way to repair them.

With Love & Energy by the Pond,

Laurel

laurel@energybythepond.com