After wearing the same walking sneakers for five years, I thought it was time to get new ones. I buy mine at an independent sports shop where the owners take a very serious approach to footwear.
They want you to come into the store wearing the shoes you currently use so they can examine them for wear and help you find a better-fitting shoe if you need it. They also encourage you to take sneaks for a test run up and down Main Street.
Awesome, except for one thing. This puts my old smelly shoes in the vicinity of people with functioning nostrils.
No, I never wore my shoes barefoot, but that hardly matters. There’s some kind of foot-to-sock-to-shoe funk transference phenomenon going on there that only the wearer of the shoe can tolerate. In fact, I keep them in the laundry room where they can’t hurt anyone in the house.
Motivated by the desire to get a really good sneaker, I soldier on and lace up the Funky Shoes and head to the store.
I’m excited that I can find a new sneaker almost right away. A very nice salesman tells me he’ll be right with me and when he comes back he says “Oh, that’s the new model of the ones you’re wearing now.”
Ugh. He’s already looked at them. Can he smell them, too?
I take a seat and nervously remove my sneaks, hoping that the guy isn’t flat out killed by what’s about to be released into the air. He’s not. Is he a robot? He crouches down in front of me to examine the shoes for wear.
He flips one over and rubs his hand over the sole, pronounces them dreadfully worn and asks how long I’ve had them. I answer four or five years and wonder whether someone could calculate that by the number of seconds it takes to pass out from the smell, sort of like aging a tree by its number of rings, only in reverse.
He does not wince or choke. In fact, the robot smiles and says he’s glad I’m replacing them. He sets down the shoe he touched with his bare hands. Lord have mercy.
I’m desperate to put the shoes back on — the clock is ticking on this bomb! Thankfully he doesn’t make small talk. He asks what size I need. Before I could answer, he went for the reach again.
Oh no.
Don’t do it, man.
Just don’t.
He picked up one of my sneakers and pulled it close to his face to read the size label under the tongue.
Does he know how mortified am I right now? Does he know he just carelessly peered into the Chernobyl of Shoes? Can’t he just toss me a heap of ten different-sized shoes and let me rummage through them? I’m convinced he’s named Employee of the Month every month for sticking his nose in the abyss of customers’ shoes and coming out alive. That, or he’s desperate for a $100 sale.
He leaves briefly to get my size and I snatch my old ones and move them up on the chair next to me, as if that’ll help. The fumes were released already and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I am Pig Pen, sitting in my own stink cloud.
He returns with my new shoes and I thank God they fit perfectly and feel great. I take them for a quick spin around the fitting chairs and give a big thumbs up. Good. Now my funk and I can pay up and leave. I’m certain the salesman needed a decontamination shower after I left. Certain.
When I got home, I immediately deposited my old shoes in the trash bin in the garage. Good-bye stinky ‘ol shoes! I later toss a bag of garbage over top of them, latch the lid and let it all simmer.
The next day I remembered I should have kept the old sneakers to wear for lawn mowing. So I went into the bin, removed the garbage and salvaged the shoes for another God knows how many years.
So let me ask you, how bad do you think they smell now?
In my entire blogging career, I’ve never seen another blogger with a whole category for embarrassing posts. Of my 449 posts, 52 are labeled that way. Is it any wonder?
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