Slippers, Racism and Charm School

It’s a good thing I love my slippers. Granted they do poke past the back of my foot quite a bit but that’s because they’re one size too big. I like this though because they still work with enormous baggy socks and when my feet are swollen. My slippers also satisfy my personal aesthetic. They, just by the nature of their size, force me to be what I’ve always wanted. It’s indisputable that this makes for a good relationship, being the best you can be, brought on by the other. See I’ve always had a fascination for women who shuffle in their scruffy slippers but whenever I’ve tried to walk that way I hear my mother in my head. She used to say: "…walk like a lady. Lift up your feet.” I went to ‘Charm School’ when I was eleven. They taught us how to balance a book and fold socks so the top of one didn’t get disfigured by stretching around the other. My mother’s prescription for me was: “You walk like an elephant.” She told the teacher this in a very loud voice the first day when she took me. I know the other girls were glad they weren’t me but look at me now. I’m aging but I made it to here, ethics intact. It’s still a little hard to scuff in my slippers though, because of guilt. I don’t want the ‘Charm School’ fees to have been a waste but when I sneak outside and it’s so early that my breath catches in the peeking light, I just scuff away.

The problem started this morning when I hit the grounded snow avalanche from the neighbor’s roof. The path I so carefully made two shovel-widths wide is now a mess of lumps and craters, frozen solid. I love the crunch though. I went up there to retrieve my errant garbage pails. The pickup was a day late because I put them out without remembering that even though racism has been covertly dominant in Boston, garbage pickup was one day delayed all week because of Martin Luther King day. The wind blowing and my aging forgetting made for a mash-up of trash receptacles, deep inside a neighboring yard. I just walked right in there, hoping the two pounds I think I lost (it could have been where I set the zero on the scale) would keep me afloat through the center-of-their-yard snow-drifts. Nothing doing. My slipper sank and left me. I was one on, sock on ice, with a fist-grip on the pail. It’s okay though. The temperature is low enough that my sock didn’t saturate and thank goodness it’s not as though my slipper fell through a pond. I like to find gratitude wherever I can. Particularly now when everything in our Country is looking up and people are so hopeful and things seem worse than ever before in the history of humankind. Thank God I didn’t have to lay on my belly and poke my slipper up and out with a stick. What if someone had come by and heard my slipper yelling “help” while my sock announced my lack of darning skills and I covered my eyes in hopes that our cultural belief: “…if I can’t see it, it isn’t happening…” would once, just this once, be true so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself and disappoint my mother.

I got it though. And my slipper is drying happily with its mate, comfortably quiet near the woodstove after I shuffled all the way back down the path. It was a little cold for the toe that pokes through the hole in my sock but other than that, I’m happy to report that all went well.