Shoes

A few years ago on a visit to my mother in Rochester, New York, I arrived just after she had tried on a pair of shoes that my sister ordered online for her. They didn’t fit. My mother would send them back to the company and my sister would order another pair. This was the third or fourth round with the shoes, with slippers and sneakers waiting in the wings.

That night I had a dream. A new footwear company had mastered the art of sizing for online shoe orders. It involved taking three measurements of each foot by length, width, and depth/thickness—heel to big toe, heel to middle toe, heel to little toe, for example—with simple, clear instructions. The average time for completing the measurements was three minutes. The fit rate jumped to 99% plus. The online footwear industry was revolutionized.

There was one problem. Some customers, most of them elderly, gave up on the measurements because they couldn’t lean over that far, or their hands shook, or they had cognitive problems with the instructions. The company, a socially conscious one and more attuned to customers’ needs than most, learned of the problem, but also learned that many elderly folk with the same issues were completing their measurements. Why? Family members, of course.

The company created a program that encouraged people to measure other peoples’ feet by offering them a discount they could use for buying their own shoes. It worked. And other things began to happen. Many helpers chose the (allowable) option of giving the discount back to the people whose feet they measured. Not only that, but both parties often continued to meet after their shoe business was finished. Research was conducted which showed that not only were the people whose feet had been measured less lonely, but so were their helpers. Neighborhood foot measuring block parties busted out all over the place.

Near the end of the dream a teenager from the neighborhood, call her Ellen, measured my mother’s feet and, like others, gave her discount back to my mother. The two of them continued to meet after their shoe, slipper, and sneaker business was done.

In the morning I told my mother the dream, then packed her shoes for return to the company. But where’s the grief here? True, it’s not center stage. If my dream had continued, though, it might have shown Ellen anxiously awaiting her next meeting with my mother to hear stories of the small-town girl who came to the big city with her husband, raised four children, nursed her husband, sister, and others in their illnesses, and lived a twenty-year stretch of independent, adventurous life before finally agreeing to move to D.C. to live with my sister and her husband.

It might also have shown Ellen grieving my mother’s departure as my mother grieved the loss of her independence.

Shoes, though. What is it about shoes? They’re different than clothes, more personal, and they evoke powerful feelings after their owner has taken her ride. A friend told me about an art class she took that started with drawing your own shoes. ‘Your shoes mold themselves to your feet,’ the instructor said. ‘They’re an image of who you are, inside and out.’

That sounds right. That just might be it.