the shoe grouch

When I was a little girl, every season Mom would load us up and drive to Jasper. I'm showing my age here, but near the courthouse was a Fred's Department store and J.C.Penney. I loved walking into the JCPenney shoe section and seeing all the beautiful shoes on display...until it became time to try them on. The nice smiling sales clerk would line us up in the chairs and measure our feet, one at a time. My sisters would get several choices. I would have one, maybe two from all those monstrous lines of shoes. It stunk. And they always looked something like this:

I absolutely HATED these shoes. The rise in the T always rubbed a blister, and none of the big girls had T's on their shoes. I was SO happy when I was able to get a pair with just a strap and no T to hold it in the middle. And then came the year of THE CHOICE.

Penneys actually had TWO pairs of girls dress shoes in WIDE WIDTH!!!!!! Oh my oh my! One pair looked something like this:

and I absolutely shocked and aggravated Mom by choosing a pair with the T! But mind you, this was no ordinary pair of shoes. Like the pair above, it had a HEEL, FLOWER cutouts, and the T and the strap WERE DAINTY! Gone was the 1/2 inch wide strap. To me it looked like a grown-up shoe. And I would have never admitted this to Mom after complaining for years on end about ugly shoes, but they didn't hurt my feet as bad.

To this day I hate shopping for shoes. I have no Biblical basis for this whatsoever, but one of the cool things about heaven will be not having to wear shoes. And if we do, I'm sure they'll be tailor made. That's worth waiting for!