100 ways to slightly improve your life #40

#40: Instead of buying new shoes, get old ones resoled and buy new laces.

Someone and Urs Truly are regulars at the local shoe repair store. Once a season or so we gather up our last season’s Prada shoes* and bring them in for new soles and a shoe shine. Someone, who has a knack for these things, knows when it is time to discard shoes rather than submit them to another round of repairs. A fashion plate I am not, and when it comes to shoes that goes double. I have a modest collection of oh-so-practical black and brown ones, along with two sets of treaders, which all get worn down past their prime. When this happens I more or less replace them with something similar. As I write this my gym shoes are in the washer machine getting their periodic cleaning.

I don’t know if this all slightly improves my life but it saves money, which more than improves my life.

I hear tell of designer gym shoes frightfully expensive and literally fought over or sold at auction. Do the owners of said sneakers actually wear them I wonder. If I had such white elephant status symbols I would be wary to wear them lest they are stained, or, if rumors be true,, they are hoisted at gunpoint.

As for the females when it comes to shoes, well, I’ve seen “Sex in the city”; I know what goes on. They look expensive and not sea-worthy (the shoes, not thems who wear them). Once when I was six I slipped into Mother’s stilettos to see what they feel like and I immediately fell forward onto my face. Taking this as a warning sign from The Goddess of Fashion, I haven’t been in heels since.

Someone has maybe three times as many shoes as I, although I don’t see him wearing most of them. Every once in a while he takes them down to dust them off. I recently threw out my cowboy boots that I wore in the 90s, in my dancing days. They are quite worn and cracked; I was holding onto them out of sentimentality but no more. I doubt I will get a new pair of boots ever.

With that said I probably should replace some of my shoes as they are becoming beyond fixing. More pressing is the need to buy sandals. Palm Springs is coming. There is a local DSW (or something like it) so perhaps that will be this weekend’s endeavor. My last pair of ersatz Roman footware were purchased during The Second Punic Wars so new ones are justified.

How often do you buy or replace shoes?

Do you own a lot of shoes?

Do you shine your shoes yourself?

*Make that last decade’s rather. Oh the embarrassment.