Back in second or third grade, for some reason my mom instituted a rule that I had to wear my dress shoes to school at least one day a week. I think she wanted to get her money's worth, because other than that one day, there weren't a whole lot of other opportunities popping up regularly to slip those bad boys on and start to stepping.
I hated those shoes with great, intense passion, and I wasn't all that pleased with my mom on those days, either. That damn shoes put a serious dent in my kick soccer skills. They also made my feet feel like someone had taken a hammer to them. Beyond that, they made me look like an insurance salesman in the making, especially compared to all my peers who were sporting tennies on their toes.
(My mom also instituted a rule somewhere along the line concerning wearing a "nice" shirt or sweater, but I circumvented that one pretty easily by wearing an extra shirt underneath whatever buttoned-up abomination she set out for me. I simply stripped off her good in favor of my tattered bad once I got to school and did the opposite before I got home. Not so easily done with shoes, though.)
Eventually, I found a good use for those damn shoes, although I'd pretty much instantly regret it. Every year at my grade school, when the weather would take a turn for the worse and the snow started to fall, it would cause pretty much every kid with a lick of adventure running through his or her bones to head off to the killer hill that sat off to the edge of the playground. Add a little snow and ice to that natural decline, and you had the makings for an all-out, downhill, shoe-sliding bonanza. Damn if my 1970's-era platform dress shoes weren't fast as lightning on that snow and ice. I mean, jet-like fast. Unfortunately, I only experienced the rush and thrill of racing down that hill on those shoes once. Yep, exactly once.
Those shoes were so amazingly slick, I couldn't get back up the hill--literally. I vividly remember slipping time after time after time after time while trying. Take a step and WHAM! Face first in the white stuff. Take a step and BLAM! Right on my arse. I fell so often and so hard, it wasn't long before I started to cry. Hard. Beyond being legitimately worried I was never going to get back up that hill, kids were whizzing by me with no regard for my immediate safety. It was like dodging human bullets. Add to that the school bell going off with me still at rock bottom, and I was beyond flustered and panicked. Somewhere along the line, I decide that crawling on my hands and knees served as my best chance of getting up. Eventually I made it, albeit soaking wet, exhausted, and with a face covered in a nasty mix of tears and snot. I froze all day sitting at my desk in those wet clothes. At recess when the other kids headed back to the hill, I ran the other way. I'd seen that monster, and I wasn't about to look him in the eye again.
For whatever reason, I still think about that day and those shoes surprisingly often. I've never really demanded that my kids wear certain clothing, although in certain situations where some decorum was called for, I really wanted to or might have even strongly suggested as much. But I can't recall flat-out telling any of them that they couldn't wear their hair in a certain way or implemented too many other similar restrictions. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing honestly. I can't decide if my mom was right for getting her money's worth from those shoes. Some days when my kids start squawking about this injustice or that, I wish I had those shoes still. I'd tie them to their feet and tell them to get to marching. I'd like to see if they hated them as much as I do. Sometimes, though, I'm thankful for the bits of discomfort that have surfaced over the years. Some things come to easy to too many people. We all should have dress shoe-snow hill setbacks to toughen us up along the way.
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