So, I was sitting out on our back deck
today enjoying being outside without a mask.
The weather was cool, but sunny. The
birds were making a delightful racket. The grass looked wonderful,
with no dandelions, thanks to the neighbor who is mowing our yard
this summer.
My recovery is coming along nicely,
thank you. I don't have a clinic appointment June 27th, so
I can enjoy where I am right now. If there is to be bad news, which
seems unlikely, but you never know, I'm days away from hearing it.
There I was feeling quite mellow, thank
you very much, when I used the peace and quiet to start thinking
about... shoes. I'm not kidding. I didn't think about the wonder of
nature; how grateful I am for modern medicine and the medical people
who are taking care of me. My mind didn't turn to thoughts of
friends, or gratitude for the abundance before me. No. I started
thinking about shoes.
Obviously, it could have been worse,
this whole random thinking thing. I could have started wondering why
corn is so hard for humans to digest; will the circle truly remain
unbroken? why people put unsharpened pencils, eraser side up, in
their pen and pencil holders. Without a point, there's no... well,
point.
I must say, at first it did not seem
completely outrageous that this off-road random thinking thing could
have been a side effect of one of my new medications. One of the ones
I will likely be taking for the rest of my life, lists 63 possible
side effects, many, forgive me if I seem crude, having to do with
what's happening with my... umm... well... uhhh... s-t-o-o-l. None of
the side effects, though, seem to involve thinking or how you go
about it.
It seems odd that I would even consider
shoes. I don't normally. In recent years, not counting the pair of
slippers I've had for over 10 years, I've never owned more than four
pairs of footwear at one time: two pair for everyday, a pair of
sneakers and a pair of winter boots. That's it. Sometimes I've even
gotten by with one pair of everyday shoes.
My wife doesn't have many pairs of
shoes, more than me, but at least hers seem to be of different types
rather than, say, eight pairs of pumps in different colors. I have
friends who love buying shoes, having shoes, coveting shoes; at the
risk of contributing to a cliché, they are all women. They don't
seem to have shoes in Imelda Marcos numbers, but they do seem to have
enough so that they never have to worry about going shoeless. They
do, though, do seem to be concerned about not having the right shoes
to wear at any given time.
Back in the day, I got one pair of
shoes at the beginning of the school year and was darned happy to
have them. When walking to school, two miles uphill both ways, with
snow even in May, if something on them broke or wore out, my dad just
fixed them, or my mother did if she got tired of waiting for my dad
to do it.
They would put on new soles and heels,
but for anything more complicated we took them to the cobbler.
Seriously. The cobbler. No elves, just a guy who look like he'd
inhaled a lot of glue fumes in his time. He'd take the shoes, fill
out a ticket, and give you the stub. I must say, I loved the smell of
that place. No, not because of the glue but because of all that
leather. Picking up shoes from the cobbler was one of the few chores
I had as a kid I didn't complain about.
My Kilbirnie grandfather actually had a
cobbler's last (if you just wondered, last what?, I'm surely showing
my age. Oh well, sue me.) though I never saw anyone use it, except
maybe to polish their shoes. Sheri assures me people still polish
their shoes. I do have some tins of shoe polish somewhere, but
whenever they resurface, and I twist that annoying little thing on
the side that lifts the lid up, the polish inside is cracked and dry
and unusable. Well, it was never the right color anyway. Usually
oxblood. As a kid, my mother would sometimes give me oxtail soup. I
was always surprised it didn't taste like shoe polish.
Does it bother me that people spend so
much money on so many shoes? Why on earth would it; not my feet, not
my shoes, not my money. Or, as I saw on Facebook the other day, “Not
my circus. Not my monkeys.” Certainly, if the shoe buyers were
thinking about shoes and writing about it all, it would be far more
interesting than what anything I could write.. I mean, I have a pair
of sneakers; they're... sneakery. I couldn't even tell you what color
my winter boots are; green, if I had to guess. One pair of my
everyday shoes is light brown and the other is dark brown. Not
exactly fascinating.
I guess the path my thinking has been
taking isn't actually a side effect of any of the medicines I'm
taking. In truth it would have been okay if it was. Certainly better
than red skin lesions, often with a purple center, or even large,
hive-like swelling on the face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat, hands,
legs, feet, or sex organs, which are among the 63 listed for the one
drug. Yikes.
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere.”
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