A Tale of Two (pairs of) Shoes...

They were the best of shoes…. they were the worst of shoes.

And here I am being silly with one of the great opening lines in literature.  At any rate, I do have tale to tell about some shoes, and it is finally drawing to a close.

The story begins early last summer when the local department store had a “two-for-one” sale on athletic shoes. I hurried on down soon enough after the sale started that there was still a fairly decent selection of shoes to choose from.

I found two identical pairs of Reebok shoes in my size. They were comfortable and seemed well made, and I bought them both. They weren’t the most expensive shoes on sale, but they weren’t the cheapest, either
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I started wearing the first pair, and they were great…. Except I noticed that almost immediately the heel on the left shoe was wearing down much quicker than the heel on the right shoe. Lots of people have an uneven gait – me included – and so I get it that the heels wear down at different rates, but this was a bit above and beyond what normally happens to the shoes I wear.

Finally, by winter, I decided I better start wearing the other pair of shoes, and so I put the removable ice cleats on the first pair so I could take the dog outside without risking life and limb in case there was an ice storm.

I began wearing the second pair of shoes, and almost immediately, the stitching on the top of the right shoe – where the leather parts are sown together – began to unravel. It didn’t really affect my ability to wear the shoes, it just looked awful. Several times I made attempts to sew it all back together. This was not very successful because it was at the toe of the shoe and I couldn’t get my hand in far enough inside the shoe to get hold of the needle.

The heel on the left shoe of this pair was just fine.

At this point a rocket scientist would have been quite useful, because the solution to this problem was obvious but it took a while for me to get there.

We're into May now, and the department store had another sale of athletic shoe, and seeing that there was no way I was going to be able to repair the shoes I was wearing, I came home with Sketchers; again, not the most expensive shoes in the store but not the cheapest, either. I did not wear them immediately though because being one of those "good to the last drop" sort of people, I decided I could get a  "a few more days" out of the older pair.

One day not too long after this, I was rummaging around in the storage area looking for something and I happened to pull out the first pair of Reeboks with the ice cleats (remember the ice cleats?), and the light bulb finally went on.

The left shoe of the pair I was currently wearing was perfectly fine.
The  right shoe of the pair with the ice cleats was perfectly fine.

Left…. Right… Yep!. So I got a “new” pair of shoes out of it, which I continued to wear until about a week ago.

“Oh,” said my aerobics instructor “You have new shoes!”

Yes, indeed I do…

So comes to an end the tale of two pairs of shoes that morphed into three pairs of shoes… leaving me to wonder why it sometimes takes so long to figure out easy solutions to problems.