If The Shoe Fits

We just got back from buying Noah some new sneakers. Last night, while I was reading to him as I do most school nights, Mel came in to say goodnight and discovered that his sneakers had become quite worn. So today we ran over to – I hate to say it – Wal-Mart to buy some sneakers and see if they might have some flip-flops for Zoë. Now I’ve ruminated in the past on the evils of Wal-Mart and I still feel that way for the most part, but when you’re scarping by and barely making ends meet, it’s really hard to ignore the savings realized at that place. As I looked around at the vastness of our particular big box, I remembered a short essay I wrote way back in the early history of Southern Transplant. I also realized how many truly unattractive people are at Wal-Mart, on both sides of the counter. Or maybe it’s just that there are a lot of really unattractive people in South Carolina and they just congregate at Wal-Mart - sort of a Club-Med for ugly people. Anyway, I recycled some old material here for you (something I imagine will happen numerous times in the future,) and freshened it up with a little original material at the end. It doesn’t reek too badly.

We went to one of those Mega Wal-Mart things the other day (or maybe it was Kmart, I don’t remember.) I have never seen so much food in one place before in my life. Where does all this stuff come from? I stood at the end of one aisle and two rows of snacks extended down beyond my vision. How many cans of Pringles have to be in any one place at any one time for the world to rotate? More importantly, has there ever been a time in history when someone needed to buy that many Pringles at once. And then, how exactly would you transport them all? Ironically, I was looking for some sour cream of the fat-free variety (an oxymoron in itself, I know,) but when I got to the dairy section (“You take the main aisle down about ¼ mile and get off at the pork rind end-cap, then stay to the left or you’ll end up in the cheese lane.”) I found that there were three huge empty shelves, but no fat-free sour cream. Ah, ha! I thought. Someone is at home right now making huge batches of fat-free onion dip for some big southern party thing that no one bothered to tell us about (they don’t tell northerners anything around here.) I grabbed a sour cream of the full-fat variety and ran! I don’t want to be around when they remember they forgot to get all those Pringles!

Ah, it’s amazing how well 90mg of prednisone a day will do as a muse.

As for our trip today, we were in search of shoes which are kept in a department buried in the back. Not quite a ¼ mile trek, but close – you take a right at the pork rinds instead of a left. We found the aisle with Noah sized sneakers and began our search. Mel found some camouflaged ones and pointed Noah toward them. “You might as well look for a size one if you can find it,” she said. Up to now, he’s been wearing size 13 youth shoes and she figured he might as well go bigger. I mean, it’s not like his feet are getting any smaller. Noah found a pair that he thought was really cool until he realized they were tie shoes. You see, Noah has made it to the grand old age of eight without ever leaning how to tie his shoes. Velcro is a wonderful thing but it has a tendency to wreak havoc with the acquisition of knot tying skills. When Noah noticed this obvious oversight by the shoe’s manufacturer, he quickly slid them back into their place. Knot tying is one of the skills we worked on in Cub Scouts this year so I took this opportunity to point out the fact that he wouldn’t be able to advance to Webelos next year if he didn’t learn to tie his shoes. Not a complete truth, but a useful misdirection at the time. “Oh, I guess so,” he said as he slid the box back off the shelf. He then searched for a place to sit and try them on. He slid off his old shoes and put on what, compared to the ones he had just removed, looked to me like shoes big enough for a clown. There were obviously too big for him but he slipped them on. “Oooo…,” he said, “These are too tight. They’re too small.” “How can that be?” I asked. I looked at his feet and the shoes looked plenty big enough. I asked him if there was any paper stuffed in the shoes. “No.” “Maybe you need to pull up your socks,” I suggested, “Maybe the socks have become bunched at the toes.” “Oh,” said Noah as he sat down and pulled off the shoes, “Maybe it’s because I have three pairs of socks on.” Um……ya think? At this point Mel rounded the corner and explained that Noah likes to sleep with his socks on (something I could never do no matter how cold I am,) and in the morning when he’s getting dressed he pulls the clean socks on over the dirty ones from the day before. In this case, being Wednesday, he was wearing three days worth of socks. Wednesday’s were over Tuesday’s which were over Monday’s. Eeew, gross! So I pealed off the two extra layers of hosiery and left Noah with his beginning of the week stockings. He then reapplied the footwear and stood up. “Do they still feel tight?” I asked knowing full well the answer. “No” was his simple reply. Gee, I wonder why. I rolled each of the two extra pairs of socks and stuck them in the small pockets of Noah’s sweat pants. He looked like an Oompa Loompa walking through the store. The cool camouflage sneakers are now part of the Hofmann inventory.

Hope everyone is happy and healthy.