Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you.
My Chucks have taken me most places in life for the last 10 years because I discovered I could stay upright in them. Not only that, they look good with everything, as Kamala Harris has shown you for many years. However, I cannot do an entire entry on one pair, because I don’t have enough memories. However, I do remember all the days I’ve worn Chuck Taylor’s.
I always had knock-offs from Payless as a kid, which always threw me off and not because other kids made fun of me. All my friends were also obsessed with Payless, more so when they got Airwalk (I won’t wear any other brand of flip-flop).
It was that I’m a stickler for design.
The fonts weren’t right, the lines weren’t right, the rubber vamp was too large, etc.
As an adult, my first pair was brown leather. I got them at Ross when they were the last pair in another woman’s hands. She was buying them for her nephew and didn’t think they’d fit. I asked her if I could have them, very nicely even though I would have cut a bitch. She said, “sure,” and I got shoes that made me look like I was in a very famous old basketball movie…….
Eventually, I wore through the soles, and I got some brown canvas Chuck 2s. They had more padding and better tread, but they didn’t look the same as the original.
And now we’ve arrived at a moment I hadn’t thought of in a long time. It took my breath away.
I had black Chucks with black rubber so that they weren’t noticeable as sneakers. Therefore, I was wearing them at my mother’s graveside service, because it was muddy and I didn’t want to wear my good shoes. Mud got all over them.
I never washed them again. Mud sat in the cracks of my tread for months, and stained the sides. Eventually, it wore off. I’d like to believe it chose the moment it knew it could leave.
I wore my mother’s sneakers to her funeral. The only reason I changed into my own was that those were my good shoes, worthy of protection. I wore them in honor of our close connection to Oprah Winfrey.
One of the classic stories from the Oprah Winfrey show is a woman who went to some sort of rummage sale where celebrities had given things away. She bought a pair of Oprah’s shoes because as she said on the show, “I wanted to stand in your shoes until I could stand on my own.” Not a dry eye in the house. Everybody went into the ugly cry for a second, even Oprah.
When I did my mother’s eulogy, I stood in her shoes. At the graveside service, I could stand in my own. I’m sure it looked a little ridiculous because they were too big. I didn’t care. I kept them until the tread wore off because they were useful when I was wearing extra layers of socks in the winter. But you don’t wear shoes without tread in the winter. I fall on my ass enough.
For new readers, the setup is that my mother was a preacher’s wife, and after the divorce, a choir director and pianist/organist until she died. The first line of the eulogy was, “this is the first funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to where she wasn’t working.” The crowd broke up, and it was my intention to bring some much needed levity into the room.
I could do that because I stood in her shoes.
Besides, if she’d watched a video of the funeral, she would have laughed until she cried and thought, “accurate.” It was problematic, but luckily I got it right, that her last name was Baker. It wasn’t hard to remember that she took her husband’s name. It was hard to remember that she gave away mine, the name I’d called her since I was born.
And bought me my first pair of shoes at all.
Stories That Are All True 