Of
shoes...and Wooly
Bears
Bill Meredith
"The time has come," the Walrus
said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes- of ships- of sealing wax-
Of cabbages and kings-
And why the sea is boiling hot-
And whether pigs have wings.
I’ve never been much of a believer in the
woolly bear method of weather prediction. A
friend once said that if you go by woolly bears
you can expect the winter to be brown in the
middle and black on both ends, and I think that
makes at least as much sense as trying to
foretell the amount of snow on the basis of
their color variations. They are bears of even
littler brain than Winnie the Pooh; at least he
knew his limitations. My skepticism was
confirmed in mid-November when I met the last
woolly bear of the season on the way to the
library.
I don’t know why the woolly bear was going
to the library. I was going to return a book and
get a new one; and our paths converged, and we
found ourselves walking side by side, at
approximately the same speed. We probably would
have had an uneventful stroll but for the shoes
I was wearing… and my wife has to take the
blame for that.
Most people who know my wife would assert
that she likes shoes. I’m not sure she does;
she prefers to go barefoot in the house, and in
the yard too, when it’s warm enough. I do know
for certain, though, that she likes buying
shoes. This led to a crisis several years ago
when we lived in the old house; she found a new
outlet store in Hanover, came home with a box
under her arm and announced that "These are
the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever
seen!" Unfortunately, the comfort didn’t
seem to last; every week thereafter… sometimes
even twice a week… the same scene occurred,
and inevitably a storage problem developed.
There was no dust under our bed; there wasn’t
room for it; the space was full of shoes. I
became aware of the magnitude of the problem
after she started putting her shoes in my
closet; when I lodged what I intended as a
tactful protest, she informed me in a tone of
injured logic that there was nowhere else to put
them because her closets were all full, and I
didn’t seem to be using the space, so why
should it go to waste?
For a while I commiserated with Ferdinand
Marcos and hoped the influx would stop when the
last closet was full, but I didn’t reckon on
my wife’s ingenuity. It dawned on her at some
point that the shoes would take up less space if
they weren’t in boxes. So eventually it came
to pass that a mountain of shoes filled my
closet and, like Fibber McGee, I was faced with
an avalanche every morning when I opened the
door. The crisis finally came one day when she
was dressing to go somewhere and at the last
minute was unable to find two shoes that
matched. Unluckily for me, it was a Saturday and
I was unoccupied; so as she dashed out the door
she called over her shoulder: would I please
"organize" her shoes while she was
gone.
"Organize" is one of those words,
like "is," that mean different things
to different people. I never found out what it
meant to her, but to me it meant sorting the
shoes into pairs before trying to find a place
to put them. After reflecting hopelessly for a
while, I began shoveling the shoes out of the
closet and lining them up along the wall of the
bedroom. After the line got about 20 shoes long,
I found one whose mate I recognized, so I put
the pair together and scooted the line down one
space. Proceeding in that manner, I began
finding more pairs; but the line kept getting
longer and when I picked up a shoe that looked
familiar it took longer and longer to find its
mate. Eventually the task took on a compulsive
nature, like working a jigsaw puzzle, and the
line extended all the way around the bedroom,
through the hall, and started down the stairs.
By the time my wife got home I had found and
united 143 pairs of shoes, and there were
another 76 unpaired ones. Pointing to the box
under her arm, I said something to the effect of
"Don’t you think you have enough,"
to which she pointed out that they weren’t all
shoes; some were slippers- and besides, these
were the most comfortable….
The ultimate solution was to build a new
house, and not take most of the inventory with
us when we moved; and I must admit that things
haven’t been quite so bad since. My wife didn’t
exactly go "on the wagon," or if she
did, she falls off occasionally… but new shoes
now arrive on more of a monthly basis than
weekly. The only difficulty now is that she
occasionally decides I need to share the thrill.
Oblivious to the fact that the hiking shoes I
got in 1979 are still perfectly good and have a
lot of wear left in them, she came in one day
last summer with a new pair that had thick soles
with immense grooves in them, as if they were
made from tractor tires.
Those shoes were on my feet when I met the
woolly bear on the sidewalk leading to the
library. As we walked along I noticed that it
seemed worried, as if it were late for some
important appointment; it was going as fast as
it could go, and seemed to be trying to go
faster yet. I thought maybe it found me
threatening, so I stopped to let it go ahead;
but it stopped too. Then it turned and crawled
under my shoe, into one of the grooves in the
sole. I waited an appropriate time for it to
come out the other side, but it didn’t
reappear. After a few minutes I lifted my foot;
and there it was, curled up in a ball, preparing
to hibernate under my shoe and clearly not too
happy that I was unwilling to stand there until
winter was over.
I went on to the library; where the woolly
bear went, I do not know. It clearly wasn’t
cut out to be a bookworm. If it was stupid
enough to try to hibernate under my shoe, I don’t
think it would have sense enough to predict the
weather either. It is equipped to deal with just
one problem: find a place that is fairly dry and
sheltered from predators, make a cocoon, and go
into dormancy. Whether the winter is hard or
mild is of little concern to it; if something
doesn’t eat it or step on it, it will greet
the spring as an Isabella moth and set about the
business of procreating the next generation.
As for me, life is a lot more complicated; my
granddaughter got my wife a new pair of shoes
for Christmas. My worst fear is that shoe-buying
may prove to be hereditary… I may be looking
for another new house before the next Christmas
gets here.