Jewels for your Feet

“I think I have one too many pairs of shoes,” our new tenant joked as he carried his third load of athletic shoe boxes upstairs to his room. He must have had upwards of 45 pairs. Now, I wondered, what would anyone do with 45 pairs of shoes? I didn’t ask, of course. I am sure these acquisitions happened over a period of time, each one seeming to offer a kind of excellence not to be avoided. Our tenant also had a carefully curated collection of sports jerseys. “I went to my parents’ house and took all my stuff,” he told me.

Since I live in Los Angeles and no longer go out to work, I have managed to get by with one pair of Teva sandals, which I have worn almost exclusively for the last two years. This feels like freedom to me: getting up in the morning and putting on a t-shirt, jeans and Tevas. I appreciate the casualness, the lack of pretension and the warm weather on the east side of our city. 

Our stance in the world, how our inner selves wish to relate to it, is completely expressed in our bodies, our posture and the way we choose to clothe ourselves. We all do the best we can to fit into the array of people we wish to align ourselves with and the positions we wish to take. Choices abound in our modern world and complex stories can be told with clothing, should one have the keys to decode them.

It was one of the sadnesses of my young life that I never had a pair of buckle shoes. I was ashamed to wear a Sunday School dress with the squat little brown Oxfords, tied with shoelaces, the only shoes I had. My nemesis, Eileen, wore clean white socks, patent leather black Mary Janes, and a velveteen dress with lace on the collar. But Mother was practical and we could only afford one pair of shoes for each. (Until I was eight, there were four of us kids, soon to be joined by four more!)

During a recent family conversation, Naomi (third in the bunch of siblings) remembered a time when we were all shipped off to different relatives while Dad and Mother went on a trip. She was staying with our Grandma Kronlokken, who wanted to take her granddaughters to a wedding. “We were a bit shabby and scrappy by her standards,” Naomi wrote me in a confirming email. “I remember that a pair of my socks, all sort of a uniform grey, turned out to not even be a matched pair once they came out of Grandma's laundry. So as not to be too embarrassed to bring us to the wedding, Grandma attempted to fix us up a bit. She did what she could with our dresses, but the scuffed and worn shoes were hopeless. So we were taken to the shoe store. 

“I couldn’t believe that the pair she bought were mine! They were burgundy red Mary Janes with a few asterisk-shaped brass studs decorating the toes. I had never seen anything so wonderful in my life. But we put them in a box and took them with us! At the wedding, and after, I couldn't stop admiring my feet. My delight in them only diminished when I saw the look on my mother's face after we were reunited with our parents. But they were a private joy to me for as long as they lasted.”

At this my niece Kim chimed in, telling us how her own mother, Susan (the sixth of us siblings), had vowed that Kim would never have to wear hand-me-down shoes, as she had. I remember those September conferences about school clothes and shoes. Kids’ feet grow quickly and I am sure sometimes our toes were pinched in shoes that weren’t quite worn out. Dad struggled to pay for all those shoes. As the eldest, I never had to wear hand-me-down shoes, but I certainly found some of my clothes in the “missionary barrels” which came to our house.

A friend of ours calls shoes “jewels for your feet.” It is certainly true that a lot of complex engineering goes into them, both in leather and the many kinds of canvas athletic shoes now available. I also recognize the “fetish” value in shoes, which may communicate certain things about identity. But I must admit I don’t notice shoes very much, except to wonder occasionally what it must take to wear the high heels women do!

Clothing is one of the first ways the inner self expresses itself in the world and most of us take pleasure in it. Even Basho, who traveled thousands of miles on difficult roads in 17th Century Japan, took the time to delight in the gift of straw sandals with laces dyed a deep blue:

   “It looks as if

   Iris flowers had bloomed

   On my feet --

   Sandals laced in blue.”

Basho strove to see in the humble, transient realities of life a vision of the universal. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a record of his later travels, he pins this down in both poetry and prose. 

The true value of things is in how deeply they reflect the spirit of their makers, how they contribute to the world we make up around us, and share with each other. Each of the things that belong to us should be evaluated with regard to how they fit into the network of order, peace and inspiration we weave around us. Indeed a contemporary Japanese person, Marie Kondo, has recommended that each thing we own should “spark joy” in us. Naomi’s red shoes certainly qualified!

Many people don’t know the “total cost of ownership.” This cost involves the time it takes to get the money to pay for an item, the time spent purchasing an item, the storage space over time that it takes up, and the effort of properly disposing of it when it has ceased to be valuable. Having a huge closet full of choices may make some happy, but collating, maintaining and choosing items also takes time. What do we want to spend our time on? Excellence may have convinced you that you need 45 pairs of shoes, but they are a load to carry about with you.

You may think that poorer and less-educated people have less ability to choose the things in their lives. This may be true to some extent, but in the modern world everyone makes choices. It begins with our parents, of course, but it doesn’t end there. Whatever wiggle room we can find in life will lead to choices which define us from the ground up! These dancers prove it.

And make no mistake, existence is about joy. Basho’s attempts are confirmed by William Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” If we look, we will see it: From the not-to-be-taken-for-granted happiness of a daily shower, to the wonder of your sleeping child and the delight of grass going to seed in the sunlight. The world is lit with love and beauty. And the devil take the hindmost.