Requiem for a Shoe





I was wary about buying them without trying them on. Twelve dollars wasn’t too bad a deal. They looked too pretty and too tall to be comfortable though. My impulsive nature got the better of me and I clicked.

They’d be date shoes, I rationalized, for dates where I’d mostly be sitting down anyway. Dinner, movies.

Yes, and if your date turns out to be a creep, they look heavy enough to hit him on the head with, whispered my inner enabler. She was kind of a glass-half empty type.

They arrived in a Balikbayan box a little over a month later. They were even taller than I thought. The sole was about two inches off the ground and the heel rose another four inches. The upper was a woven raffia strip barely two-inches wide across the front of my feet.

I got a lot of flack for them partly because of their height. I’m already notoriously balance-challenged, meaning I fall down and trip on a much more regular basis wearing flats than regular people do wearing heels. I ignored all the naysayers. All I know is that they felt wonderful.

You wouldn’t think so from looking at them but I could run after cabs, skip over puddles, and occasionally manage to not ungracefully navigate cobblestone sidewalks while wearing those wedges.

The footbed aligned perfectly with my arch, like they were molded from my feet, or at least from my exact foot double. While they felt sufficiently solid under my feet, they were so light that I never ever dragged my feet while wearing them.  They never teetered nor tottered, never wavered nor wobbled, except when I’ve had more than a few drinks. And even then, I imagined I looked adorably long-limbed while doing said wobbling. Whether the delusion was from the shoes or the alcohol is still undecided.


As tall as the shoes were, they were even louder. I do not mean the metaphoric kind of loud where they inevitably almost always draw people’s notice. I mean literal loud. They’d click and clonk with every step I take, predicting my arrival from forty paces as surely as rippling water in glass announces Godzilla’s.

Depending on my mood, I could do a brisk pitter-patter when I’m in my efficient getting-things-done mode, or heavy ominous clumps that were appropriately accompanied in my head with John William’s Imperial March when I still haven’t had my morning cup of coffee.

They definitely were not shoes for the timid. The wooden wedge reverberated across floors. They made different sounds when I land with my heel or the balls of my feet leading me to wonder what a Dutch Morris dancing troop wearing clogs would sound like.

When I was bored, I’d tap my feet, rocking between my heel and toe, like it was a percussion instrument. Of course, it probably sounded cool only in my head. I imagine it drove everyone else crazy.  (I do have this half-baked theory that the clicking sound of heels signify something to every woman wearing the shoes. How it’s primeval and instictive, maybe harkening back of the clippety-clop trot of the pony every little girl dreams of having. I don’t know what that says about me and I can’t really explain it further. It’s like Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman, they’re just somehow connected.)

It wasn’t all tipsy wobbling over and clippety-clops though, the shoes got a lot of compliments. They looked good and I wore them for the better part of three years. Holding on to them for much longer than shoe-manely possible before I surrendered them to shoe heaven.

Sorry I couldn’t resist. Sorry, not sorry.

S. T.

Ms. Shoe Lover