Tales of my father

I wear running shoes, or sneakers if you prefer, practically all year. I think I currently have two pairs of running shoes and one pair of boots. I think that is all the footwear I own. When I was married my wife had about one hundred pairs of various footwear.

My father grew up on a farm. He died March 5, 1997. His preferred footwear was cowboy boots, or as he sometimes called them riding boots. I rarely saw him wear anything else. I owned a few pair through the years, I could never like wearing them.

Years ago I had left home, was single, and trying to figure out my way in life. I had a bit of an adversarial relationship with my parents. Both of them made my life miserable in my late teens. It may have been by design or there may have been other issues unknown to me. At one point I got fed up and left and cut off contact for a number of months.

Things got better after a few years. Things got far better years later. We were never the type of family to talk about things so past issues were never discussed. I never did find out what the problem was. After a time I started coming home to visit on the occasional weekend.

Dad had kind of decided that maybe he should seek out more comfortable footwear. Wearing cowboy boots all those years were getting to be hard on his body. So he bought a pair, a good pair, of running shoes. He wore them twice, tossed them in the closet and went back to wearing boots. Dad was a creature of habit and some habits were hard to break, namely wearing boots. On a visit home when I was getting ready to leave I noticed a like new pair of runners in the closet by the front door. Dad and I were the same shoe size so I put them in my bag and never mentioned it to anyone. I figured he owed me for past transgressions.

My father could occasionally be absent minded. On a subsequent visit home I checked the closet and there was another pair of pristine shoes. He must have thought he forgot where he put the last pair, given up trying to find them, and bought another pair. I filched those as well. He would try runners but kept going back to his boots. His boots were part of his identity, dad never seemed to be dad if he was not wearing a nice pair of cowboy boots.

I carried this off a few more times. Then one day I got a phone call.

“Have you been stealing my shoes?”

“Yes.”

I heard “Goddamn it” in a slightly annoyed voice. “I could not figure out where my shoes were disappearing to” and he hung up. 

I left his footwear alone after that. I had enough shoes for years.