Hold Up Just a Bit on That Advice

In my last post I gave you young whippersnappers some dandy advice, perhaps the most important advice I could give as a late-middle-aged person who has been around the block a time or two. The advice was that if you are walking while you are repeatedly going around the block, you should wear comfortable shoes.

Today I have a caveat: Wear comfortable shoes that fit.

As I was going about my de-stuffifying a few weeks ago I found a pair of brand-new shoes I had never worn. I know! How wonderful is that? When I saw them I remembered that I had bought them in an end-of-season supersale (non-returnable, but so cheap), put them up on the top shelf of the closet until the appropriate season rolled around again, then promptly forgot all about them.

De-stuffifying for the win! I LOVE these shoes. They are a well-respected brand, exactly the right shade of red to go with my winter wardrobe, appropriately low-heeled without being boring, everything I wanted in a shoe. And when I slipped my feet into them they felt as if I were wearing Cinderella's favorite bedroom shoes.

So I wore them to work yesterday for the first time, and about halfway there I remembered a tiny detail about the shoes: They were size 10, and my feet are a dainty size 9 1/2.

"Pffft!" I thought. "I LOVE these shoes. How much difference can half a size make? A quarter inch? I'll just scrunch up my toes and they'll be just fine."

I thought that for fifteen minutes, until I was walking down the hallway of our main administration building, smiled at the student sitting there with her laptop, and this happened:

I looked exactly like the guy who's about 10 seconds into this clip, the one with his shoes flying off.

At that point I glanced back to see if the laptop student had noticed. She pretended she hadn't--the sight of a member of the college's senior administration inadvertantly kicking her shoes across the lobby does not engender great confidence that tuition is money well spent, so that probably was the best reaction I could have hoped for.

Then I went back home and got a pair of shoes that fit, and the de-stuffifying discoveries became de-stuffying discards. Someone else will be wearing my beautiful, comfortable shoes, and I hope they love them as much as I did. I'll be wearing my dignity, and that's even more important than comfortable shoes.