AUGUST 6, 2022 –
I once read that “shoes make the man.” Throughout life I’ve observed this fashion principle in practice.
The first example was my dad. He owned several pairs of high-end dress shoes—shells and wingtips—and at an early age I noticed his treads more than his threads; doubtless because at two, I stood closer to his feet than I did to his bow ties. After supper, when he ambled upstairs to change out of his suit, I loved to follow and watch him remove his shoes, then, with authority, insert a cedar shoe-tree into each shoe and park the pair neatly in the closet. I was also mesmerized by his weekly shoe-shine operation—his sense of mission when extracting polish from the can and rubbing it liberally on each shoe, then brushing the leather forcibly to bring out the shine. I always knew Dad had his act together, but I found added proof in his shoes.
I noticed too that both my grandfathers wore well-shined dress shoes, though of a style more dated than Dad’s. In each case, though, the grandpa shoes projected a sense that the man who wore them knew what he was doing; and most important, that he could and would do what needed to be done. I figured too that if you kept your shoes shined, you’d live forever.
Then there was the distinguished gentleman who lived directly behind our house and worked at the courthouse, just like Dad. My parents always referred to the man as “Judge” Green. When I was a pre-schooler, that didn’t mean a whole lot, so I’d greet him has “Mr.” Green. He never corrected me. At lunchtime, he’d return home to eat, and after alighting from his swanky car, he’d wave and say hello, then walk across his concrete driveway to his house. The leather soles of his polished wingtips crunched in the most satisfying way over tiny pieces of his fragmenting driveway. “Mr.” Green was on top of his game, and his shoes confirmed it.
By sixth grade, I was fully attuned to my classmates’ shoes. Lots of farm kids were bused to Franklin Elementary, and on our side of the confluence of the Rum and Mississippi Rivers, were the “sand farms,” as Dad called them, and not very prosperous. The shoes, I noticed, were on the scruffy side. Town kids, by contrast, wore upgraded shoes, and about this time, the cooler boys—the ones into team sports—started making sartorial statements with Jack Purcell “blue-tip” sneakers. Since Purcell’s were expensive, however, my frugal mom wasn’t about to blow her four-kid clothes budget on a pair of upper crust footwear for her son, outnumbered by a super-majority of daughters. And I wasn’t about to approach Dad, who tore his sticks of Juicy Fruit in half to double the life of a pack of gum.
Though I was discovering that my athletic abilities were geared more toward individual sports—running and skiing—I nonetheless managed to advance myself toward the “cool crowd.” My aspirations were devastated, however, on the day when Dick V., an established member of the cool club, told me, “You’d be cool if you wore cool shoes.” (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
