Shoe and tell

Shoes are kind of weird. They’re necessary much of the time, like for safety, but what they’re made of and look like—those can be odd things. I recently threw out the shoes I’ve worn for mowing the lawns (and all other outside work) since I moved into this house. It was definitely time for them to go.

In general, I’m a kind of “waste not, want not” kind of guy, but even I have my limits. I bought those shoes while we were loving on Auckland’s North Shore, and they were my everyday shoes for many years (though I had some others, too, and I had shoes that I wore for outside work back then, too).

After Nigel died and I started looking at houses in Hamilton, I wore those shoes to the open homes because they were easy to slip off and back on. That was a good idea because most Kiwis don’t wear shoes inside someone else’s house, and never a home that’s being shown by real estate agents, including home open homes. In fact, if a house attracts a lot of folks to the open home, there can be a crowd of shoes outside the front door. However, even by that time, the shoes were showing signs of wearing out.

When I moved into my house, I at first kept wearing the outside shoes I’d been wearing for a few years, but their rubber soles cracked through, and there was no way to fix them. At the same time, the signs of wear on my open home shoes had accelerated (once it starts…), and they became my new outside shoes, especially because in those Lockdown Days I didn’t have a lot of options.

A brief digression: What I call “outside shoes” are just ordinary shoes that are wearing out that I wear for gardening, mowing the lawns, and other work outside (and yes, I’m aware that shoes I wear out in public are also technically “outside shoes”, but my shoes, my rules, mkay?). I also have “inside shoes”, which are inexpensive shoes that are bit more robust and, well, shoelike than slippers are. I never wear those outside (except, maybe to check the letterbox).

The thing is, anyone with dogs has to contend with gifts left on the lawn, ones that may be invisible until they leap out underfoot while we walk across our lawns. Having outside shoes means if such an event happens, I won’t track the gift remnants into my house because the shoes don’t go inside except for the garage. Also, and somewhat miraculously, I manage to avoid stepping on the gifts; perhaps I have an invisible force field?

As those outside shoes continued slowly deteriorating, I made efforts to extend their life: I re-glued the back of the sole of one shoe twice, and then it peeled off a third time. By then the rubber soles had a hole worn through to the harder rubber underneath, the padding at the back had popped free as the stitching at the heels failed, and the stitching along the upper was opening up in places. At the end, the heal of one shoe was flapping as I pushed the mower around. It was time for them to leave, and they went out in the rubbish collection a couple weeks ago, immediately after I took the photo above, and that was right after I finished the mowing that week.

I already had replacement shoes ready to go: A pair of runners/trainers/joggers/whatever they’re called where you’re from that had been Nigel’s. He bought them maybe more than 20 years ago, but I know that he was still wearing them in 2006 because my friend Jason snapped a photo of Nigel and me (at right; I originally shared the photo five years ago, in one of my earliest grief journey posts) while Jason was visiting us. Nigel eventually stopped wearing them, having bought other shoes—some of which he also stopped wearing. I tried the shoes for mowing one time, and when I took them off, I accidentally loosened one sole from heal to about two-thirds of the way to the toe (because I hadn’t loosened the laces enough, and had used the toe of one shoe to hold/push the damaged one down to make it easier for me to slip out. Oops.

I forgot about that until I went to get them to mow the front lawns Wednesday of last week. I wore them, anyway, but the back of the sole was flapping around just like the now-gone former outside shoes did. Wednesday night I re-glued the sole and they were perfect when I mowed the back lawn on the next day.

I know that my current outside shoes, already showing signs of wear, won’t last forever, and I may not even have the opportunity to make any further repairs before it’s time to put them in the rubbish, too. However, what this tale underscores is that I do what I can to repair and even make do rather than always buying something new. So much of what we buy, even “good” brands, is designed to have a short useful life, and I do what I can to upset corporations’ plans.

In this case, the now-gone outside shoes were ones that other people would have thrown away long before I did—though this isn’t a competition. Many people don’t have the time, skills, resources, whatever, to do what I do, and I probably won’t be able to do it forever. But right now, I do what I can to extend the usable life of the products I buy, and that includes repairing what I can repair, reusing or repurposing perfectly good things I already have (and donating what I no longer have a use for). This is part of the values that Nigel and I shared, namely, to live as sustainably as possible—though he would’ve thrown out those shoes much more quickly than I did (our values were aligned, but not entirely identical…).

I still buy new stuff, of course, though not a much as I once did (us pensioners have a strong incentive to live frugally so that we don’t have to live austerely). I’m not part of any sort of “no buy” movement, but simply the stop-and-think movement. Do I need that that new thing, or do I already have something that will serve the purpose? Can that old thing be repaired or refreshed, as needed, or is it too far gone? And all that aside, is the new thing I want something that I really want, regardless of the answers to the other two questions? Because if so, I’ll buy the new thing—I’m just human, and neither a monk nor a radical.

Everyone needs to decide for themselves how to live their lives and how to put their values into action. This shoe story is really about how I go about doing that. Old shoes can tell us a lot about a person, apparently.