A week after Skye and I were married we watched all of our belongings get packed into boxes, piled into a giant, yellow moving van and shipped to Ohio, where we’d been waiting ever so impatiently for their arrival. We slept on the living room carpet of our empty apartment for three days, waiting for that yellow truck. Skye was about to start his first job out of engineering school and I was pregnant. We yearned to have our familiar things surrounding us, pronto. We had nothing. Not even cups from which to drink. It sucked and then I cried.
To make it suck a tiny bit less, we decided to buy some cooking utensils and a fry pan because, we figured, you can cook anything in a fry pan. Anything at all. Which must have been what prevented Skye from zeroing in, from the vast selection, on one particular pan. He was probably thinking of all the things he could cook in the next few days, and in the life of the pan, and since he doesn’t cook, he was having a hard time deciding which pan would be right for the job. Should we get a large pan or small? Cast iron or Teflon? He read all the manufacturing labels and tested how they felt in his hand. This was the first insight I had into the tedious inner workings of the engineer’s brain in decision-making mode. I twisted the brand new wedding band around my finger and wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?”
When Skye’s 45-minute fry pan deliberation came to a standstill, and he waffled between a large pan for flap jacks and a small cast iron skillet for eggs, I reached for the pan in his hand closest to me and said, “This is the best one.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. You checked them all over and you keep coming back to this one,” I said, and threw it in the cart with our paper plates and cups. “Let’s go.”
It worked. He came out of his decision-making trance and he was happy again.
Fast forward thirteen years.
When our son Vincent discovers a pair of shoes he likes, he wears them months after they should be thrown in a dumpster. He wears them until his foot slides out the side. I tell him his shoes are in worse condition than the shoes on the children who made these. That they were not intended to be worn longer than two months. They are plaid fabric. Pantyhose are more durable.
He doesn’t care. He loves them.
Recently, I took him to the zoo. I tried to con him into wearing his well-made sneakers with arch supports and laces, appropriate footwear for the zoo and all it’s far away walking. He wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t pull rank with him either because while the good shoes were sitting on the shelf, ignored, he outgrew them. He prefers the plaid pauper’s shoes.
On the way home from the zoo, when he was complaining about his sore feet, he agreed to shop for a new pair the next day. Many next days came and went and we never made it to the shoe store. But we did make it back to the zoo to see the wildlights exhibit.
As soon as we got there it started raining so we looked for a Jesus parking spot and found one. It was more exciting the first time. Now I’ve come to expect it.
We held onto each other’s mittened hands and covered every inch of that zoo, in spite of the rain and the puddles and our soaking wet feet in our inappropriate footwear.
“My left foot is still dry but my right food is soaked,” Vincent reported halfway across the zoo.
“Same here,” I said.
“The tape came off my shoe. Now the flap is wide open.”
“Wait. You put tape on your shoe?” Where I would be awash in mom guilt had this been my first child, I am resigned with the second child to “you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him put on new shoes.”
“Uh-hmm. But it’s gone now.”
“What kind of tape?”
“Scotch.”
I thought he was going to say duct tape. He is just like his father. He has been talking about fixing that shoe but I tell him there is nothing anyone can do for plaid cloth sneakers once they fall apart.
“Can you sew them on your machine?”
“They’re trash, hon. Not made to last.”
I woke up the next morning at 3:00am, which is a little earlier than I’d like, but the house was nice and quiet and I could write and pace and form paragraphs of uninterrupted thought, unless interrupted by tripping on a pair of wet plaid sneakers. Ridden hard and put away wet. There was no way they could dry in three hours when he needed to leave for school.
Mother of the Year scooped up the ragged shoes, put them in a bag and drove to the 24-hour Super Wal-Mart, the only store where you can crawl out of bed and buy size 5 children’s shoes and nobody cares. I had the store to myself. It was the fry pan experience all over again. A large selection, an urgent need.
None of the Velcro sneakers looked like something a fourth grader would be seen in, unless they were being picked on. Had I brought Vincent, we would have been there for an hour, trying on all the shoes that were slip-ons or Velcro, circling the racks over and over to find “the cool shoes”. In five minutes, I narrowed it down to two size 5’s. Cammo and black corduroy sneakers, but they had laces. This was going to be new. Would Vincent be able to get past that? On the way home I pondered how I would persuade him that these sneakers would be an improvement over his wet, worn plaid favorites.
Skye wakes up. Showers, gets dressed for work. He is one of those people who can wake up alert. He notices the new shoes on the floor in front of the shoe shelf and says, “Whose shoes?”
“I went out to the Super Wal-Mart at 5:00am and bought them for Vincent. His plaid sneakers are still wet from the zoo.”
“Mother of the Year. But…um…they have laces.” He says, indicating that they are going to bomb.
“That’s why I’m going to use my super persuasion powers.”
“You’re going to need that. Now more than ever.”
At 7:00am, Vincent woke up and without turning on his light I went in with three pairs of shoes.
“Vincent? I’m not going to turn your light on, but reach out in front of you. Feel these.”
“Are they my plaid sneakers?”
“Yes.”
“Ew.”
“I know.”
I had him right where I wanted him.
I said, “Now I’m going to turn on your light and show you two pairs of shoes I bought while you were sleeping.”
After much trying on, first the black corduroy pair, then the cammo pair, then the black corduroy pair with thicker socks, then off, then on, Vincent decided that the black pair would do.
I tossed the plaid sneakers in the garbage. It can meet up with that big, ugly Teflon fry pan. When I return the cammo pair, I’ll pick up another pair of the black corduroy sneakers the next size up.
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