“The point of life is comfortable shoes. If you’re not wearin’ comfortable shoes, life is just chaos.” – Cliff Clavin
I bought new golf shoes.
I didn’t mean to.
I don’t golf.
This happened when I shopped for a business-casual shoe at an endearing, enduring, century-old haberdashery. Jim, the owner, has long been my go-to shoe guy. His thumb is the thumb I want to feel pressing down on me to measure the gap between big toe and shoe tip, the gold standard for proper shoe fit.
I shop in-person because I distrust mail-order and online shoes. My dad once ordered dress shoes featured in a chintzy ad placed in a Sunday newspaper supplement. The ad didn’t even show a photo of the end product, just a line art rendering, as if doodled on a damp, overused cocktail napkin by a vodka-veined inventor desperate to meet the publication’s deadline.
The package reached his rural route mailbox months later. He must’ve selected carrier pigeon as the preferred shipping method to cut costs. The return address referenced China. I still imagine my dad feeling cosmopolitan and worldly while cradling the package and skipping to the house to open it. To this day, I still don’t know the exact details about why he never once put the shoes on his feet. Via phone, through maniacal fits of laughter, Mom recounted, “He pulled off the lid. We stared into the box. I started laughing. Then he started laughing. We couldn’t stop laughing.” She hung up, still laughing. The shoes were never referenced again. It remains the greatest unsolved mystery of my life.
Were the shoes so shoddily seamed, so comically cobbled, that even Dad refused to wear them? I imagined him at midnight digging a hole in the backyard to hide evidence of his purchase, muttering to himself under the full moon, “That’s $8.99 I’ll never get back.”
I have always appreciated the individual attention Jim offers to his customers. Never is there pressure to purchase something from him. No matter how many times I send him to the stockroom for alternate shoe sizes, he returns with a smile, a trusty shoehorn at his side.
Lately, my shoe brand has been Johnston & Murphy. Based on the three-figure price tag, the brand should be renamed Johnston $ Murphy – if not Johnston $$ Murphy.
That I will buy almost-$200 shoes is a testimony to their comfort and quality, for frugality runs deep within my bloodline when it comes to footwear. I am the son of a son of a shoe stretcher man. My grandfather, a dusty denizen of The Great Depression, owned a stretching device that expanded the length of his family’s footwear in order to lessen costly trips to the shoe store. To hear Dad tell it, you’d think his high-school graduation shoes were the same ones he had worn in fourth grade – only lengthier. My grandpa also repainted Dad’s tricycle a new color each year and regifted it to him at Christmas, tricking him into thinking it was a new one.
At Jim’s store, I admired a dapper, tan, business-casual shoe on the wall display. It was pocked with hundreds of pinholes. A foot needs to breathe. The midsole cushion advertised, “Smart Degree Technology,” bringing to mind visions of hovercraft capabilities. The shoes were waterproof, eliminating the need to shop for shoe umbrellas.
“We sell quite a few of those,” Jim said. “They’re casual, yet some men even wear them with suits.”
Sold!
I was giddy during the drive home, lost in that new shoe smell, likely as excited as Dad was carrying his Sunday supplement shoes into the house. I wore them to the office and at an Anne Frank play, carefully avoiding high foot traffic areas to reduce the risk of scuffing. There was a new spring to my step. New shoes. New man. I swear that I even hovered at times. I imagined passersby envying me for my fancy, new shoes. After each wearing, I returned them to the shoebox to preserve their newness and to protect them from the older shoes in the closet.
The last time I put them in the shoebox, I noticed a particular word on the lid for the first time: GOLF. My new business-casual shoes were actually golf shoes! Surprise! Had Jim assumed I was shopping for golf shoes? It’s not his fault that he didn’t know that I didn’t golf. Although I had noticed how the soles did resemble rubber cleats, I really didn’t make the connection. I always thought golf shoes had to have those scary looking metal spikes. I’m from the 1970s, remember.
I felt foolish. People weren’t envying me because of my new, kick-ass shoes. They were laughing at me for wearing golf shoes everywhere but on the golf course. I might as well have been wearing scuba fins.
Maybe Dad’s shoes from China had actually been golf shoes. That would explain my parents’ laughter.
I worry what golfers might say to me. “You’re nothing but a footwear fraud. You’re not worthy enough to wear those shoes,” a seasoned, hoity-toity golfer might declare, calling me out, side-eyeing me. I’d likely do the same if I noticed a non-writer wearing writing shoes.
It could be worse, I guess. It could’ve been bowling shoes.
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com
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