#this one is a bit of a shoe oddessey tbh

[nataliedormered]

so i've basically just felt like collecting the stories about all of my shoes that i keep in my mind, in my blog instead. i think of my shoe collection on kind of the same level i think about my book collection: something full of stories, experiences, emotions, and beauty.

i know for a lot of people shoes are simply practical, they get you to from point a to b without stepping on a rock. i know people who only have two pairs of shoes. if you like this, i'm probably going to do more of these so stay tuned, if you don't that's okay this obviously feeds a very particular kind of interest.

full disclosure: while i own some fairly expensive or difficult to acquire brands of shoes, i'm not doing this to show off my "wealth" or lack of. nearly all were bought on sale or passed down to me. i am a generally savvy sale shopper with a lot more luck than $$$

So this shoe story:

This shoe stories begins with the tale of another pair of shoes. I had a pair of black oxfords (i believe from nine west - perhaps spring? - but definitely no more than $20), with about half an inch of a heel that I had from 2013-2015. I loved those shoes. I wore them nearly everywhere from spring to fall (and through a single vancouver winter) two years in a row. if you know anything about nine west or spring shoes you are already seeing the problem.

by the beginning of summer 2015 they were utterly destroyed. but i loved them so much. they were so worn and flexible they were practically jazz shoes, a favourite for rehearsals that weren't character shoes.

but alas it had to end. my mother, tired of seeing her daughter wander around with holes in the soles of her dirty, smelling, half destroyed shoes, made me throw them out. however this was not terribly cruel. she did not rip them from my hands as i wept, it was a reluctant but understanding goodbye. you can wear your shoes until your toes are poking out the ends but you will at some point have to let them go.

she did promise me one thing though, and that is that she would replace them. which is a fair promise if you throw out your teenage/near adult daughters favourite pair of shoes. so after a long drawn out search that always reached the conclusion of not quite right, these shoes finally came into my life.

while visiting vancouver in the fall of 2015, my family went shopping through gastown and found this John Fluevog workshop and fell in love with so many pairs of shoes there. i believe my mother bought both herself and my shoes from there, although i cannot remember what she bought for sure. she justified the shoes for me because they replaced the ones she had thrown out (and i would stop whining about it.) these are probably the most expensive shoes (money paid wise not original price) that i own at $235ish. but my mother paid so counts as free in my bank account

now these are obviously not black supple oxfords, but they are so gorgeous in their own particular way. first of all they are so beautifully made, the leather is so beautiful. i thought about cleaning them to show off their truest, cleanest beauty, but i think that defeats the point of showing off how i love my shoes. the soles aren't plastic, but rubber. and damn, do i have a thing for designs in the grips of a shoe, it's such a wonderfully understated way of doing something so unique to show off the craftsmanship in the shoe.

this is where the story goes downhill. i don't pack a lot on vacations that i intend to shop on because how else am i suppose to get it all back? (my mother and i do have a bit of a bad track record for shipping special books found at local booksellers back home in order to avoid going over the weight limit) so of course i'm going to wear what i've bought. so the next day i wore these new beautiful pair of shoes all. day. long. that day we happened to be going to the vancouver aquarium, which is in the middle of a park. so i walked down the street from our hotel to catch a bus, walked through a park, walked through the aquarium, and all of that in reverse back. those who know about stiff leather shoes already know the problem.

to be completely honest, the aftermath probably wouldn't have been quite so bad had i not have worn socks with broken elastic around the ankle. the long and the short of it is that i got two very big blisters on the insides of both my feet around my heel. i didn’t want to draw attention to my idiotic mistake so i just ran out to buy bandaids the next morning and wore my doc martins very loose for the next few days.

things in general were pretty as normal for a few days after returning from my trip. i put bandaids on the holes in my feet and kind of forgot about them. they were still uncomfortable, and now i couldn’t wear my fancy new solemates (shoes - soles - get it?), but i just kind of left them? which was a terrible mistake

the long and the short of it is one of those giant holes in my feet got a staph infection. i figured this out when one day it hurt way too much to put shoes on or even touch and later that night i took off the bandaid to see a kind of puss/blood swollen mess about half an inch protruding from my foot. it looked like the inside of a muscle. it haunts me to this day. so i went to emergency because at this point i can barely walk and it’s like 10pm. I wait until like 2am to see a doctor and get a prescription for an antibiotic cause ya it’s probably a staph infection because staph lives on our body all the time and i just gave them such an opportunity to slide in my wounds.

complete side bar but - Radiolab did a super interesting show about this viking cure for staph which weirdly aired at the same moment i was suffering with this staph infection so i will never forget it http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/

now this obviously causes general disruption in my life: including but not limited almost getting fired from my job because no one will take my shifts even though i can’t walk, rescheduling a shitty group project presentation, and not being able to wear shoes for three days. cool right?

now you are probably thinking this is a pretty long and kind of wild story about a pair of shoes, right? are you glad it’s over now? well wait a minute. i’m not done. things happen in three don’t you know?

i turn out to be allergic to the antibiotic that they gave me, i get some really cool, itchy rashes on my hands and am told to stop taking them immediately and then just pray that the staph infection gets better or get an iv antibiotic. now as a good theatre kid i knew things come in three’s and thought the third thing was definitely going to be me having to get hooked up to an iv for two weeks.

it was not that, it instead was my dad having a (mini) stroke (there is a word for it i forget, but it is all good and fine and he is alive and well) so it was a pretty generally terrible time of life, that all began with the suffering these beautiful devil shoes rendered unto me

and to be completely honest it took me a long time to get over it and wear them again. in my defence it was winter and i live in a very snowy winter city so i couldn’t have worn them until spring anyway. over the last year and a half i’ve been wearing them a little at a time, wearing them in, molding them to my feet. soon they’ll be perfect. they’ll give me no more trouble. the picture above with the girl with the pearl earring socks is from last week.

life goes on, shoes get easier to wear, holes in your feet heal with no scarring, your father gets better, you can now list the antibiotics you can no longer take, and you learn what it means to suffer. and that’s just life