What I Learned From My Dad's Big Shoes

What I Learned Wearing My Dad’s Big Shoes

My dad, Jack Allen Kroh had really big, heavy, wonderful shoes that he took off at the back door when he came home from the shop. He had blue work shirts and pants, and big soft old blue hankies that he used to check the oil in customers’ cars. My mother hated that.

I thought for years that “blue collar” meant my dad, and I still respect men who work hard and have callused hands. My dad had a Goodyear patch over one pocket and his name over the other. On the back of his shirt, it said Clarion Vulcanizing Company. I remember poking my dad’s back, hitting letter after letter as I spelled out, “V-u-l-c-a-n-i-z-i-n-g.” It was the biggest word I could spell in grade school, and it meant those tire baking machines that cooked new tread on old tires.   

                But his shoes were the coolest of all. If they sat at the back door, it meant he was home. Maybe we could go to Cooks’ Forest for ice cream; maybe we could look for bears, or spot deer. All because those shoes brought my dad. They were so heavy that us kids, my sister Judy or my brother Jack, or I, had to lift them with both hands.

They were important shoes too. My dad couldn’t work without them and when his back hurt my mother always said, “It’s time to get new shoes.” New shoes were a great event, and my dad stopped frowning, as his wonderful new shoes made him feel better.

                My Aunt Jo—my father’s sister—and Uncle John lived right next door to our house. Their yard merged with our yard and we played in both, because my older cousins abandoned their playhouse and we took it over. My Aunt Jo never complained about kids in her yard and we stayed out of her iris beds and never tried to eat her crab apples, although we threw the fallen ones at the boys.

                And at night, when my mother was making dinner and she ran out of something, say margarine, she’d call, “Lessie, you run over to Aunt Jo’s and get me a stick of oleo.”

                I’d been chosen for a grown up job that called for grown up shoes.

I’d leave the TV blaring Huckleberry Hound, and run to the back door in my sock feet. Then I’d stick my feet in those huge, old, work, shoes taking up a fraction of the space. I’d hang onto the doorjamb for dear life to get me and the shoes over the threshold and out onto the back porch.

                 Thrilled it was dusk and I could be out after dark I clomp- clomped down the two porch steps and started across the yard. It was deliciously scary because I had to go slow to keep in my shoes. It was dark, and Scary Things might come for me. I never really knew what Scary Things were. For my sister they were bears, but for me they were just Scary Things. If they came when I had on the big shoes I couldn't get away fast enough. And I could never ever run away and leave the shoes. How would my father go to work if I did that?

                I loved to wear them because they were his. They were black with black laces and smelled like rubber, and my dad himself. They carried him around all day long. They were wonderful.

Once I got through the yard, I had to go up the hill to my aunt’s house. Now I will tell you that the older I got the smaller this hill got, but in the shoes with the Scary Things around it seemed like an “obstacle mount to the sky.” And it was always muddy right there. So I was extra careful to not step out of the shoes. A cold muddy sock got me in trouble with my mother, who did the wash, and my father, who had to wear a shoe with mud balls inside.

                Then I got to my Aunt’s door opened it and shouted, “It’s me Lessie. Can my mom have some oleo?”

                My aunt would come to the door with oleo and look at me in my huge shoes. She would laugh, a little sound like “Ah-heh, ah-heh,” that she made mostly in her nose. And home I would clomp with my prize, happy to be in the shoes.  

                Today I have size eight feet, but I still take my shoes off when I come in from outdoors. I have to walk five minutes up to CVS for butter if I need to finish dinner. My shoes are not as cool, and my father and my aunt are gone.

But it does seem to me like we would all be better off if we could stick our heads in our neighbor’s back door and yell, “Hi, I need a stick of butter,’ and get what we needed with or without great shoes.   

                 

                 

What I Learned From My Horse

I saw my beloved at the 154^th Hartford Fair. My dreamboat, the one on whom all my fantasies rested. Okay, before you really start to wonder about me, I’ll tell you he, my beloved, was a big white horse. A truly white horse, with pink skin, and pale blue eyes. The most beautiful equine, most beautiful living thing, most beautiful single creation God ever made. 

To understand my rapture I have to take you back a ways. Remember that rhyme, “starlight, star bright, first star is see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight”?

Well from the time I understood what that rhyme meant I said, “I wish for a pony.” This was probably my parents fault because they took me to a shady grove in Miola, to the pony rides on Sunday afternoons. The ponies, bombproof little beasts, were led around in a circle by their handlers. Only when I was very young, early elementary school, I learned to make the pony go around all by myself. The first thing of my very own I ever succeeded at. And my parents wondered later why I was horse crazy.

Only I wasn’t just horse crazy. I played horses too, continually galloping through the front yard as a wild mustang of the plains. I had a huge collection of horses, which stood on shelves in my bedroom watching over my sister and me as we slept. My sister had dolls, I remember Chatty Kathy, I had horses, King and Tucson, and Sampson, and Whirlwind to name a few. They were Breyers, or other plastic horses, or made of china. Once I made my mother put back something she wanted to buy, so I could have a horse I just had to own. I named that figurine Trouble. My mother agreed that was a good name for him. 

Then my life went from longing to ecstasy in seventh grade. My parents always maintained they bought me the man of my dreams because the eye doctor told them to find me a hobby other than reading. They said if I got an A in math, I could have a horse. So I told my seventh grade math teacher and she gave me extra credit until she could, without too much favoritism, give me an A. The class cheered for me. I never did that well in Math again, and my parents had to pay up. 

In 1969, or seventh grade, kids still rode grade horses, the mutts of the horse world. But that didn’t matter. It only mattered that I could have a horse of my own. And his name was Silver. And he was 16 hands of pure whiteness, with blue eyes that had a little of the devil in them. He was lazy and green-broke, and never put any effort into anything except not stepping on me after he threw me off. 

He was a unicorn, a racehorse, a knight’s charger, Pegasus, a pony express horse and I think we may even have helped Paul Revere on his midnight ride. 

Learning to stay on his back—I never did have riding lessons—and taking care of him taught me to be the persistent, independent woman I am today, almost forty years later. Gave me compassion for those weaker than me and no sense of ever being discriminated against. 

I carried hundred pound sacks of feed into the barn. I did what I wanted to do, ride, ride, ride, with nobody saying a girl couldn’t, shouldn’t. Silver wouldn’t stand still for the farrier if I weren’t there. He always whinnied when I showed up at the barn. He once got away from me when I dismounted and headed for home with me about fifteen feet behind him. He looked around to see if I was following. When I ran to catch him, he trotted. When I stopped running, he walked. I followed him a couple miles with him laughing at me the whole way home. 

I sold him to a fellow 4H er when I got involved in a Christian group that met Friday nights at college. I couldn’t come home to ride and every horse should be ridden, groomed, and made to listen to daydreams. I cried as I rode my bike the bank to deposit the $250, I had been paid for him. And I cried most nights for months because I missed him so much. 

But I had to grow up. 

And I thought all that as I looked in a big box stall at the fair and saw Vanna, a white (get it?) horse with beautiful blue eyes. I even said to my husband, “Look it’s Silver.” Now Roger never met Silver, my first love never met my second. I told people back then that I married Roger because he had the same color eyes as Silver. And I tell Roger that l love him more than I ever loved Silver. But it’s pretty close. 

And I stood there at the fair, looked at Silver or Vanna, and thanked God for all He taught me while I was on horseback and all he taught me about people as I rode with other horsemen. 

Roger and I walked through the barn and I realized that God delivered me from idolizing horses. If Roger and I bought a horse I would have loved it to the exclusion of all else. I would have doted on it and shut people out of my life. I would have been involved in all things horse and never explored the rest of what I could be or do. 

So I have to say that though I still miss Silver, who is surely in horse heaven, I am glad God lead me down another bridal path. I like who I am, and what I do, but I surely never could have done it without loving a big white horse.