Hands and Shoes

It wouldn't be correct to say that the reason John and I became friends was our shoe problem.   It was something we shared, yes, like we shared our love for the records of Captain Beefheart and for Anchor Steam beer before it became known across the country.   At the time we both worked for a company which had its headquarters at the heart of the city's financial district, even though it wasn't a financial concern but an agricultural.  We worked in the department called Data Processing, a name sounding archaic today, and since changed in most American corporations at least twice, first to MIS - Management Information Systems , and then to IT - Information Technology.

The company had a strict dress code - white or light colored shirts, neckties, pressed slacks, no jeans or khaki trousers, jackets (which could be taken off while in the office) or suits, and shiny leather shoes.  This was before Wall Street invented so-called Casual Dress Fridays.  Our, John and mine, shoe problem was with the leather shoes.  Due to perhaps the shape of our feet, I still don't know the reason,  we could never break in a pair of those hard leather shoes that businessmen and lawyers wear.   They scraped, hurt our feet, and we suffered having to wear them long before we met and started working for the company.

To cope with the problem and still keep our jobs we first began storing in our desks a second pair of shoes, comfortable sneakers, which we would put on before going out of the office during lunch hour.   Then, Reebok and other sports shoes companies introduced black walking shoes, soft leather tops, rubber soles, and we started wearing them at all times, and getting away with it.  Walking the street in the financial district, the stockbrokers and other suited stiffs passing us gave us contemptuous looks.   We didn't care.

As I said, we got away with it at the office, but John did not fare as well at home.   His fiancee and roommate was a tall Ukrainian beauty named Eva, who once won a Miss title of her state which was Iowa, Kansas or some other agribusiness state, I no longer remember which,  where she grew up on her parents farm.  Eva did not approve of John's sneakers.   Her father, she told us, always dressed up to the nines, on Sundays when the family  went to church, or whenever he traveled to town to meet with lawyers, government officials  or business people.  He taught her that you can tell everything you need to know about a man by looking at his shoes.

She forced John to wear his wingtips whenever they went out  to restaurants, theater or the symphony hall.   I often accompanied them, alone or with a date, and I remember one time when we had to stop at a drugstore on the way to town to buy a package of wide Band Aids for John's bleeding feet. He walked wearing those shoes like a man who had been crippled by some childhood disease.   I would on such occasions wear a jacket, colorful patterned shirt, fresh unfaded  blue jeans, and white tennis sneakers.  During the intermission at the symphony hall Eva pretended that "we don't know this guy".  John tried explaining to her that I was "bohemian", but I don't think she understood the word.

She worked as a model,  mostly hands model as a matter of fact, owing to the beautiful and photogenic pair of hands with long fingers and no skin blemishes.   This was the time when mountain biking was becoming popular, and John bought two bicycles and spent sunny weekends biking the trails in the hills with Eva.  One time she wiped out and badly hurt her left hand. Stitches, healing time, scars, her modeling career on hold, Eva blamed John for the mishap, and John blamed himself.   She eventually broke off the engagement, and moved back to Iowa, Kansas, or whatever state she was from.  John was brokenhearted, and I could do little to cheer him up.

Eventually he recovered, and two or so years later he showed me an ad in a running magazine showing a pair female hands handling expensive running shoes. He said, "Look, those are Eva's hands, she's back in business!"  

Eva's shoe rules and the drama surrounding them seemed amusing to me for a long time, until I experienced something similar many years later when a lady friend told me that "real men" wear socks that reach their knees, and I just didn't measure up with my half calf assortment of socks. And to this day, seeing advertisements picturing female hands I wonder every time if they are Eva's.