This is a story about shoes, 300 pairs give or take, and my 30-year relationship with a significant other named Amy, who lived in Kansas with her parakeet, and whom I never got a chance to meet.
Amy and I were introduced to each other in the early 1970s through N.O.S.E., or the National Odd Shoe Exchange. The organization was founded by the late Ruth Rubin Feldman, a lady with two different sized feet. Sick and tired of buying two pairs of shoes and throwing away her opposite sizes, Ms. Feldman reasoned that there must be thousands of others out there like her and perhaps she could make a few bucks pairing some of us off. Ms. Feldman set about announcing N.O.S.E. to every shoe catalog recipient in the U.S. That is when I found myself paying the deliciously cheap $15 registration fee, which promised hundreds if not thousands of dollars in savings later. I was matched up with Amy, my official mismate, a person my age then residing in Oklahoma, whose right foot was size 4 and whose left foot was size 6.
Our initial flurry of correspondence laid down the rules: no heels higher than 3/4”, no Neolite soles (like walking on wet ice), no Birkenstocks, platform shoes, espadrilles or wedgies. No silly quasi-shoes, like sandals with straps that meandered among the toes and snaked up one’s ankles like some Grecian parody. Sneakers and tennis shoes were especially welcome. However, we later amended this rule to prohibit those contoured and cushioned engineering feats with maliciously reinforced instep bridges that promise to get you through the Bataan Death March. We loved Easy Spirits and Naturalizers and Life Strides and Aerosols. These were practical, down and dirty, close-to-the-earth footwear. Our prayer was humble: Give us shoes not only pleasing to look at, but which carried its unstable wearer safely, securely, and fearlessly across all sorts of terrain.
Our early correspondence also laid down the common ground we shared. Amy and I had polio in the late 1940s, before the vaccine, when there was a series of small epidemics all over the United States. In our growing up years, we had been forced to wear ugly oxfords with a lift on one shoe and braces and crutches. We knew the indignities and challenges that children with disabilities experience. We’d also undergone pretty much the same surgeries and long hospital stays and years of physical rehabilitation. There were many things we didn’t have in common, too. Amy loved country and western music; I didn’t. Amy was a born-again Christian; I wasn’t. She was a divorcee with a young daughter; I was single. She had grown up in the Midwest, her great-great grandparents forced into Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, while I was raised in New England.
At first Amy and I dutifully observed the protocol we had established early on. We would first send a written description of the shoes purchased, even drawing primitive little pictures of them, with arrows pointing to any highlights like sequins or bows. Later, we would mail the odd pair with the receipt stuffed inside the toe, usually with a little note providing a brief update on any new events in our lives.
More often than not, I didn’t particularly like the shoes Amy described to me, but I would swallow my vanity and ask her to send them anyway, and I would wear them. It’s logical to assume that Amy didn’t always like my choice of shoes either. I think we had reached an unspoken compromise, though, that it was far more important to keep our shoe exchange alive and well in the interest of paying half price for shoes that were, well, reasonably attractive. And there were those memorable high points – one of us would find a pair of shoes that we both absolutely loved, would wear to death, and reminisce about later when the style was discontinued. I especially remember a marvelous pair of Sebastinos, similar to espadrilles but with beautiful ribbon laces and without that miserable uphill heel. Amy and I wore those until they fell apart.
After a few years, we stopped sending descriptions of shoes we’d bought – we’d just stick them in the mail with the receipt. Shortly after that, we agreed not to pay each other anymore. It all seemed to come out in the wash, and we no longer had to feel like we were coughing up money for shoes that maybe didn’t deserve to be paid for. I remember, for instance, receiving a pair of pointy-toed red prom shoes with bows and sending Amy snowshoes shortly after she had moved to Los Angeles.
Sometime in the 1980s, our shoe sizes ratcheted upward — in lockstep, you could say — to 5 and 6-1/2. This could be attributed partly to gravity and the aging process and partly to the shoe manufacturers, who decided that any woman left in America still wearing a size 4 should either go barefoot or die. In our notes to each other, we lamented increasingly hostile shoe shapes and styles. For instance, why did Mervyn’s and Dillard’s think no woman should wear anything under size 6? Why were leather shoes, the Cadillac of footwear, so damned expensive? Why did some catalog companies brag, “We have your size!” without adding, “in the most butt-ugly styles you’ve ever seen!”
In the late 1990s, Amy was forced out of Los Angeles by a growing economy that would no longer support her blue-collar job. She moved to an apartment in Kansas and filed for disability, having just experienced the beginnings of post-polio syndrome. Around then, I decided to call her for the first time. She had written a sad note about the loss of her parakeet, and I wanted to reach out and tell her I was sorry about her loss, but I was also ready to break through this peculiar barrier we had set up.
Her voice was small and high and intelligent. We talked about many things, but I especially remember her urging me not to file for disability – something I was considering back then – because the monthly checks were so tiny that she had lost what little freedom and independence she’d had. A few days later, I received a thoughtful and wise letter that opened my eyes to Amy and her world and, incidentally, changed any notion I had that I could live on a monthly disability check.
The stuff of our relationship deepened and began to evolve into a friendship. We began exchanging letters not folded into the toes of shoes, but in real envelopes with stamps on them, long letters full of empathy and encouragement and caring. We exchanged photographs on occasion. In one, I see a slight woman with dark brown hair and big glasses, leaning against a wall and wearing a windbreaker and a particularly comfy pair of Keds.
I’d written to Amy about some of the challenges I’d faced in my earlier years that were buried and had recently come to light. She recently wrote a happy note about her new parakeet. But she had also written about the deep fatigue that set in on certain days, and how she had to stock up on food in preparation for periods of bed rest: “I no longer cook. I apply heat to canned things. My days of casseroles and meat & potatoes are over.” A year or so after that, she wrote about her daughter’s marriage to someone several years her senior, and the nice pair of navy blue shoes Amy wore at the wedding purchased with a coupon torn out of AARP Magazine. I recognized them, of course, because I had a pair just like them.
My exchanges during those 30-odd years with Amy by phone and through the mail helped me to see my life as special and very precious. Where once I had defined our relationship in terms of the differences that seemed to separate us, later I began to see us as comrades. We shared our aches, pains, and complaints, but with a respectful nod toward the ties that bound us beyond different shoe sizes. We spoke meaningfully of our fragility and our common struggle over the years to reclaim ourselves and to see our own divinity. I realized how lucky I was not to have post polio syndrome, lucky that I could afford to send Amy the shoes she loved and could no longer afford – the Easy Spirits, the Keds, the Aerosols, the Naturalizers – and so very lucky that I had the luxury of going to restaurants to dine on food heated by other people.
A few years ago, Amy and I began to lose touch with each other. The shoe catalog companies were out of business thanks to cheap shoes from China, and we no longer exchanged shoes. She didn’t have an email address because she didn’t trust the Internet. Occasionally I would receive a nice letter from her in her flowery handwriting on pastel stationery. I was a lousy snail mail correspondent, though, and after a while, our exchanges dwindled down to nothing.
I feel sad about this. For all those years, I had relished the idea that one day Amy and I would joke about how we finally went back to the oxfords we were forced to wear in school, but this time it would be for practicality and comfort and we wouldn’t care anymore that they were the ugliest damned shoes on the planet. Well, that’s exactly what has happened with me. I wonder if that’s the case for Amy, too.
