My Shoes and I: Funny and Sometimes Heartbreaking Experiences with My Shoes and More

By Liberacion Narvios Tecson

Whether the shoes we owned are trendy or old fashion, expensive or not, and whether the wearer is just an ordinary person or a celebrity, wearing them impacts our lives one way or the other. Those shoes may bring us to some sad memories of embarrassments or shame, or may be the opposite of it. They also influence the way we behave or the way we

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648957154

Liberacion Narvios Tecson

Liberacion Narvios Tecson is a Fil-American living in Houston, TX, USA. She has retired from being a self-employed business woman, and a practitioner and teacher in Accounting and Auditing. She taught in College for 14 years at the University of Cebu, Philippines, formerly Cebu Central Colleges, and 4 years at the Texas School of Business in Houston, TX. She is a Certified Public Accountant, a book author, a poet and a crafter particularly in the art of Fashion Designing and Interior Decorating. She was also doing business as a food caterer and as a dressmaker.

Book preview

Part I

Introduction

Owning a good pair of beautiful shoes is not only my personal obsession, but it is also the obsession of almost everyone in the world. Together with a nice dress and a handbag, shoes complete the matching fashion of a woman. We love to line them on our rack by colors, heights, and styles. No matter how many pairs we have accumulated, we never stop buying for more. No wonder a former first lady had three thousand pairs of shoes arranged in the basement of their presidential palace. So personal is the attachment of some people to their shoes that even movies about shoes draw them in a queue to get tickets so they could see how the shoes connect to the lives of the characters in the movie and feel in themselves, as well, how the stories relate to their own lives and their shoes.

On the other hand, men too love to collect shoes for some reasons. Any shoes endorsed by a professional NBA player always made it to the top-selling list. The players even invest money to promote a shoe design created by them to represent their own taste, their temperament, and the like. Wearing long-sleeved shirts, denim pants, a cowboy hat, and matching cowboy boots just makes every guy feel and walk like real Westerners—a model of a ruggedly handsome American male. The clicking of the boots’ heels when he walks makes everyone turn their heads. Executives and professionals too, those who wear business suits and carry leather bags, they wear matching shiny, black leather shoes to make a smart-like appearance. This, to them, is a mark of success.

Shoes also reminds me of a deceased uncle who always and purposely stomped on the foot of the person next to him just to show that he wore a brand-new pair of shoes. When noticed, he would ask, Do you want to know how much I bought this pair? The price was always exaggerated, and then, he would laugh. So we labeled him as The Uncle Shoe Boast’ that every time we saw him coming, we would announce: Here comes Uncle Shoe Boast, and then, laughter filled the air. I missed his beautiful smile and the sound of his laughter. He was a gregarious shoe-lover, and he used his shoes to make people happy.

No one can definitely trace who invented the first pair of shoes. Perhaps Adam and Eve were the originators of the first shoes. When they were banished from the Garden of Eden, they had to walk over ridges and plains under a scorching sun and cross rivers with sharp tiny rocks underneath the waters. To survive, they must have devised something to protect their feet—a layer of dried leaves perhaps or a piece of wood tied under their feet that gradually evolved into a sandal, shoes, or boots. Nowadays, shoes are made for many different reasons, different designs, and different colors and heights.

From the time the shoes was invented to the present time, we could not count how many millions or trillions of shoes have been manufactured and sold to meet the needs of the users and the shoe enthusiasts.

Shoes tell different stories about the wearer; example: a muddy pair of shoes worn on a hot summer day would tell how lazy the wearer must be. Shoes also tell the profession or title held by the person wearing them, like the shoes of the fisherman. They are worn by the pope, the heir of St. Peter, a fisherman, and the first pope of the Catholic Church. He was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. They were recruited to become fishers of men, for they are sent out to spread the gospels of Christ to the whole human race and convert them to the faith. Actually, Peter, the fisherman, did not wear shoes similar to those worn by the popes who succeeded him. The phrase shoes of the fisherman is only symbolic, and it defines the role and obligations of the pope as the highest authority of the Catholic hierarchy. Cardinals also have their own distinctive design of shoes, just as the Vatican Swiss Guards have.

Clowns, jokers, and royal jesters have designs of shoes that distinguish them from other people. Ballet dancers wear shoes designed to have flat fronts so their toes could carry their body as it sways and turns with the music while their arms extend in the air as if flying. Ice-skating shoes have blades that can withstand a frozen floor, enabling the dancers to do jumps and twirls, lands and dance perfectly without going off balance, and shoes with rollers instead of heels give speed to race how fast and how far one can go for a prize in a competition. Sadly though, soldiers on the other hand wear combat boots that could last until the war is over or, if unfortunate, die with them in the battlefield.

Although movies about shoes produced by Hollywood are mostly fictional, they send lessons and messages to the viewers as if the stories are real. The movie The Red Shoes tells of a love triangle where a married woman who performed ballet operas had to decide who between the two men she had to follow—her music composer husband or the ballet choreographer—and she chose the latter because with him, she could perform on stage with her red dancing shoes. But in the end, she threw away the red shoes and ran to her husband, ending up to a tragic death when a running train ran over her. This is just one example of how shoes plays a role in the story. There are quite a number of movies about shoes that Hollywood produced, each with different stories to tell while making the producers make money from their investments.

Part I of this book recollects my experiences with some of the shoes I have had. Some of them told heartbreaking stories of embarrassment and disappointments, like the flying shoes, the soleless shoes, the uneven shoes, and the un-dancing shoes. Others tickled my sense of humor, like the laughing shoes and the mismatched shoes. Unknowingly some of them, like the weapon shoes and the wedding shoes, exposed my vanity and fickleness: a character common among us who loves to wear shoes for show. The kicking shoes, said to be good luck shoes, altered the life of my family forever, and to settle the issues of my shoes with irreconcilable differences, I had to place them both in the garbage bin to rest my case on them. In this edition, I added two more kinds of shoes which I overlooked—The Wooden Shoes and The Recycled Leather Shoes. They also had given me some valuable lessons in life—something worth reminiscing anyway. Looking back, now I can tell how those shoes changed my outlook