The "black" shoes
Hi to all, and welcome aboard the Flashback Friday Express. We're heading back to 1977, so fasten your seat belts because we're ready to depart.
We I was younger, we really never had anything to speak of. Times were tough, so anything you could get for free, you acted on it (A habit that I have to this day). Since I was a "husky" child, and couldn't wear my brother's clothes when he grew out of them, I didn't have his hand-me-downs. Not to fear, my mom had a co-worker who had a son a year older than me, and a size bigger. This is where I got my hand-me-downs.
I didn't mind most of the stuff he gave me. Most of the pants needed hemmed, since he was taller. There were a few shirts that I didn't care for, but still had to wear. It was the one pair of shoes that I really didn't like.
To say that these shoes were ugly would be putting it mild. They were a three toned brown saddle shoe with at least a two inch heel. They looked like something a pimp might wear. Or a clown. The toe and heel were a very dark brown. The upper was a "Crayola" brown. There was a light brown triangle on each side. The soles were black. I tried to find a picture that even remotely looked like them, but without success. Good thing. You probably would have needed to use eye bleach.
When I first got these shoes, they were too big. Mom kept them because I would grow into them, and they still had a lot of life left in them (that was probably because they were kept hidden in the back of the closet by the previous owner).
When I did grow into them, I didn't want to wear them. Since money was short, and shoes didn't grow on trees, I was told that I was going to wear them. Since I HAD to wear them, I had to come up with a plan. And that I did.
Building model cars was one of my favorite pastimes. I rummaged through my model paints until I found what I was looking for. BLACK. I took that black model paint and painted those ugly brown shoes. When I was finished, they didn't look bad. If you didn't know that they had been brown, you never would have been able to tell. About once a month, I "touched them up" with the paint, then applied a layer of black shoe polish. I wore them until the ninth grade.
Do you have any horrid shoe stories?
2 comments:
Yes I do! In the 2nd grade, I had to wear these dark red shoes that I hated. I don't really know why. I just did. I thought they were so ugly and red, even if it is a dark red, DOESN'T go with everything. I had to wear them until they wore out or I grew out of them. I can't remember which came first. I had to wear alot of hand-me-downs, too, because I was the youngest of three sisters. Also, my mom traded clothes with a lady who lived in Columbus. They had met when mom was in the hospital one time. The other woman had children, some of who where older than us and younger than us. She and mom exchanged clothing packages for quite a few years, so we got of lot of hand-me-down clothes that way, too. We actually looked forward to the packages, hoping there would be something in them that would fit us, something that we LIKED! :-)
Very creative and inventive! I could actually picture the shoes in my head because you described them so well.
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