Back in the Truman administration, Mom read me the Cinderella story about a prince who brought his entire kingdom to a screeching halt to track down a woman who lost her shoe. At five years old, I knew nothing of kinky kings with a foot fetish, but I did know this: a man with a palace to run should not be mooning over footwear. This “dereliction-of-duty tale” soured me on women’s shoes for life.
Then came Prince Andrew, splashed across the tabloids for sucking on Fergie’s toes. In Boston, we don’t go in for that sort of thing. We don’t even joke about doing that. And since then, I’ve lived six shoe-indifferent decades of marriage to Minako, raised granddaughters, and watched a million pairs of women’s shoes pass me by like ghosts in the night.
Meanwhile, the global shoe industry exploded. Half of Italy got jobs making, marketing, and polishing ladies’ footwear. My own house turned into a branch office of Imelda Marcos, with shoe racks groaning under the weight of the national debt.
But me? Nothing. Nada. Not a glance. Shoes were for keeping feet warm, dry, and covered. They weren’t fashion. They weren’t romance. They weren’t on my radar. Do other men remember what shoes their beloved wore on their wedding day? Or even last week? We obsess over wardrobe nicklines, hemlines, hairstyles, and lipstick. Shoes never cracked the top ten.
Until last night.
Minako, who may or may not have hinted that our diamond anniversary was approaching, had arranged dinner out. She had a whole ensemble—skirt, blouse, vest-like thing—and there they were: black leather medium heels, stylish, gleaming, impossibly coordinated.
And I… noticed.
It wasn’t exactly a thunderclap from the heavens, but to me it was a thing. A revelation. A man who had gone sixty years as a “shoe mute” suddenly heard a “Satori Moment” of footwear. I even said something out loud: “Those are great shoes.”
She looked at me with the suspicion of a woman who knows her husband has been faking deafness for six decades. But I wasn’t faking. For once, I saw what she had been wearing on her feet all along.
So what’s the moral? Maybe I’ve turned into an octogenarian fashionista. Or maybe, just maybe, after sixty years of love, even a blind man can finally notice the shoes.