Shoes...Shed 'em at the Back Door, Please!

Shoes…
Shed ‘em at the Back Door, Please!


We have a Rule at our house about street shoes: Shuck ‘em and shed ‘em at the back door! So, there they are, six pairs of shoes lying lifeless in the wicker basket in the back foyer, waitin’ for tomorrow.

It was not always that way, of course. The Rule was initiated some years ago by our daughter, Leslie, who is somewhat obsessive about certain things. While she will preserve the life of spiders, lady bugs and other small creatures, capturing them and turning them loose outside, she is ruthless with dust and grime. I suspect her floors would pass muster with St. Peter and assure her entrance into Heaven.

But like all new habits, parading around the house in bare feet took some getting used to, not to mention the embarrassment of explaining to visitors that unless they removed their shoes we’d have to do our visiting through the screen door, so to speak. But after several stern lectures and demonstrations of exactly what clung to the soles of shoes, and with no loss of friends, we capitulated. This was brought vividly to mind recently on our trip to China.

Get this picture: Here we are, tired after a day of touring, and Martha is sitting there on the bus exhausted, massaging her foot…with her shoe on, clearly oblivious to the gooey gook that covered the bottom of it. “Martha, WHAT are you doing? Can’t you see what’s on your shoe,” I shouted? Realizing what she was doing, she recoiled, “Oh, Yuck, look at that slimy goop dripping from my shoe,” frantically grabbing handfuls of Wet Wipes and scrubbing her hands and feet mercilessly. And parenthetically speaking, we mostly avoided contact with Martha for quite a while afterwards!

Now, reflect for a moment and you will see the wisdom of the slight inconvenience of leaving your shoes at the back door. Why, just think of where your shoes have walked on any given day. Imagine, as my daughter pointed out, the creepy-crawly germs and pathogens that find their way from shoe soles into your fine silk rugs and wool carpets. Imagine them clinging to your feet and crawling up your body as you get into bed, or to the animals that sleep with you? Can you get that picture? You will soon become the perfect host…and your home the perfect habitat and filthy incubator of these deadly microbes (well, sometimes I may exaggerate).

Hogwash, you say…but before you dismiss this idea as sheer lunacy, consider some its advantages:

• Bare feet return us to childhood, which in these times some escapism is a good thing…what child ever worried about the stock market or who got elected to anything?
• Your poor feet will say “Thanks” for letting them breathe fresh air for awhile…”fresh air,” you say? Yeah, just take a whiff of the inside of any of your shoes and you’ll know about “fresh air!”
• Then there’s always the freedom of propping your feet on any of the furniture, tables or counters with impunity and without fear of contamination or hearing that dreaded admonition from you-know-who, “GET your feet off that!”

And the list goes on and on…

There may be some symbolic meaning hidden within this inane vignette for you philosophic types who like to dig into the esoteric meandering of such minds as mine. Go ahead, have at it, but I offer this obvious tip: The Shoe Rule offers us the daily opportunity to leave some of the world’s crud at the back door when we get home, and I don’t know about you, but as for me I like to shake today’s contaminated cruddy dust off of my feet and leave it outside…it’ll be there tomorrow when I put the shoes back on!

So, “Shuck ‘em, Shed ‘em and Park ‘em at the back door…they won’t leave home without you!

Bud
October 30, 2008