I know that I have written about this before, but it bears repeating: I have no idea how my son, Clyde, wears the shoes that he does. Fit, it would seem, is completely optional. Of course, so is color, style, appropriateness for weather and physical activity—but all of those issues pale in comparison to the fact that the shoes he wears almost never, ever fit him.
I was reminded of this yet again when I took him to buy a pair of shoes for one of his dance classes the other day. Using the size of the shoes he was currently wearing as a guide, I told the woman at the dance studio what size I thought Clyde was; she handed him a pair of shoes to try on while she and I talked over more important matters, like how a thin little pair of shoes could cost so much money. So we didn’t get to see Clyde putting the shoe on his foot. We did, however, get to see him peel his foot back out of it after she had felt Clyde’s toes to check the fit and noticed that the shoe was so tight his toes had practically curled under his foot like some kind of 19th century Chinese concubine. As he peeled the sausage casing/shoe off of his foot, and as the foot itself unrolled between us like some monstrous tongue, both the woman trying to fit him with new shoes and I had the same reaction. “How did you ever get that on in the first place?”
“I dunno,” was his illuminating answer.
It’s hard to be angry at him when he’s being so accommodating—he will literally put on, and wear for the next six months—any shoe you give him, without one word of complaint. It’s frustrating, though, because, all things being equal I’d kind of like to buy him shoes that fit, and it’s hard if he reacts to everything from a size five to a size nine the same way. “Maybe it’s a little tight.”
When I was little there were still some shoe stores that had those old machines that would x-ray your feet to see how well your shoe fit. I never used them (I remember my mom putting the kibosh on that idea), so I don’t know if they actually worked, but shoe shopping with Clyde is starting to make me wish that they were still around.
It’s not that I don’t understand Clyde’s hatred of shopping. I totally get doing anything possible to get out of trying on new clothes. (In fact, when the New World Order arrives and we each get issued our own personal clone, I’m not going to use mine for spare kidneys and corneas—I’m going to make mine go clothes shopping for me. Although, after spending a few years doing that my clone might wish I’d gone the organ donor route instead.)
And yet, even I don’t have a problem with shoe shopping. Well, not as much of a problem. So I really don’t understand his reluctance to get a pair of shoes that actually fit.
It’d be a little different if we had someone to pass the outgrown shoes down to, but even though Clyde’s “big” sister is now both four inches shorter as well as four shoe sizes smaller, I doubt that she will be growing into Clyde’s cast offs any time soon. Not that she could take them if she did, because one of the most obvious downsides to wearing shoes that don’t fit is that you wear them out quicker when you can only fit half your foot in them.
The upside being, of course, that when they do wear out, you don’t really care. After all, it wasn’t like they fit in the first place.