With New Shoes, Come New (Stinky) Blues

For the first time in a very long time, I was able to buy a new pair of shoes and not feel guilty about it. I know what you’re thinking, oh please, not another story about the difficulties of being a part of the poor working class.

Well, I’m sorry, but it is what it is. We writers tend to talk about what’s on our minds, and for the past five years, having absolutely no disposable income has been a big part of my life.

When we opened our sandwich shop in 2016, we had the world by the small and curlies. Well, that’s at least what we thought.

“I,” long pause, “am a business owner,” I’d say proudly to people when they’d ask me what I did for a living.

“Oh wow!” They’d reply because, for some reason, people hold entrepreneurs in high esteem. You could be the owner of a squirrel breeding facility set on bringing down Big Energy with your army of power grid infiltrating rodents, and people would still think you’re the cat’s meow.

Actually, I sort of would love to own that business.

Meanwhile, there I’d be, slinging sandwiches and thinking about my overdrawn bank account.

The world of business ownership isn’t always what it’s cut out to be. After closing down our shop, we set out on the long road to financial recovery, which meant paying down the thousands of dollars in debt we had acquired and never again eating out at a restaurant because the price of meat is forever skyrocketing.

For the past two years, my family has lived on a shoestring budget. The people in our lives marvel at how we survive, but my husband and I know the truth.

You just get on with it.

You pay the bills or call the bill companies and tell them you can’t pay the bills this month. That’s life.

We’ve managed to make some headway, though. With Jamie working an excellent job and me gaining more traction with my writing, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Bad analogy. I know.

Either way, we’ve got a bit of money in the bank now. I still don’t pay my bills on time, though. It’s not because I don’t have the cash, but instead, I like to hoard the money in my chequing account and open my app about ten times a day just to see it in there. Having a dollar amount that doesn’t have a minus sign in front of it is a novel experience.

The cheapskate mentality that we’ve lived by for the past five years isn’t easy to let go. Even with the extra funds, I still purchase discount meat from the store and look for deals anywhere I can.

Recently I realized I needed new slip-on shoes.

I don’t wear shoes very often as I like to feel the gravel beneath my toes. A country gal at heart over here! But as far as society goes, they want me to wear shoes in stores to receive services. Not much a gal can do to get around those rules.

Slip-ons are the best because as soon as I step foot onto my property, I can whip them off with great vigour, watching them fly through the air and revelling in the feeling of the soles of my feet connecting with the earth.

The slip-ons I had, though, were getting old. My husband was embarrassed to go anywhere with me because of the holes that were in the soles. I walk funny and tend to kick my feet backwards and high when ambling about, which meant that those travelling behind me could see the holes in the bottoms of my shoes. They’d loudly whisper things like, “Oh dear, that woman desperately needs some new shoes” when seeing my footwear.

Didn’t bother me. But Jamie cares about this sort of thing and told me I deserved new shoes.

So I set out to the Walmart.

Hawzaa! Black slip-on shoes in the five-dollar discount bin right before my eyes!

Luck, as it seemed, was one side. I bought my five-dollar shoes and slipped them on in the car, feeling fine.

That afternoon, as I was in the dollar store buying various discount deodorants for the family, I started smelling something foul. Like, it smelled as though a rabbit had pooped in a rotten banana peel, and the substance was left in the sun to sour.

Huh. That’s unpleasant. I thought while side-eyeing the impeccably dressed woman beside me.

You, my friend, cannot hide your stank behind that expensive facade. I judgementally reckoned while smirking to myself and feeling extremely pleased with my snarky inner comment.

I headed over to the greeting card section because I like to buy cards in bulk — so I have a card for every occasion at the ready. The smell followed me. I looked for the well-dressed woman, and she was nowhere to be found!

Wait. The smell at this point was so intense that I started gagging. I have a super touchy gag reflex that did not serve me well in my provocative years. My husband has become a pro at ignoring my dry heaving while we engage in bedroom activities. He’s a champ for so many reasons.

It seemed as though the smell was coming from me. My feet, to be exact.

I realize that slip-on shoes should probably be worn with socks. But as per my earlier statement, I hate things on my feet and only wear the bare minimum when necessary. It turns out, these particular five-dollar shoes had absolutely no breathing abilities, and my sweaty tootsies were stinking the place up.

And by “the place,” I mean the general vicinity of wherever I was standing. It was getting real bad up in there, you guys. Children — the stinkiest of all the humans — were even beginning to look at me funny when crossing my putrid path.

The woman in the expensive pantsuit strolled by. She gave me a side-eye while inadvertently bringing her hand up to her face, trying to create a layer of scent protection between my feet and her nostrils.

Of course, I should have put down my basket full of cheap toiletries and left right then and there. But it was my shopping day, and I really didn’t want to spend the extra gas to drive all the way home (four blocks), wash my dogs, find unstinkable shoes and then come all the way (again, four blocks) back to the dollar store.

So I did what any financially conscious person would do in this situation.

I discreetly made my way back to the bathroom supply section of the store. I did a couple of shifty eyes to my left and right to ensure no employees were around. I grabbed a lavender-scented lotion and went to town on my feet.

The result wasn’t great.

The rancid smell of sweat-stained soles was strong and now mingling with a very cheap faux lavender atrocity, but you work with what you got when you are in this sort of situation.

I wanted to put the industrial-sized vat of floral lotion back on the shelf. It was like, only missing two scoops, for christ’s sake! But, in the end, my better judgement got the best of me. Leaving an opened jar of anything on a shelf for some unsuspecting sucker to buy is just not my style.

I may be evil, but I’m not that evil.

As I made my way up to the register, I looked down at my feet. The smell was getting better because it seemed that the longer this cheap lotion was on my skin, the stronger it got. Now, instead of smelling like a dead fish with maggots crawling out of its eyes, I had the odour of a 90-year-old woman with a potpourri-filled sachet in her pocket because she couldn’t find her perfume and figured, “Meh, who will know the difference anyway?”

Not to mention my feet were covered in big white splotches of lotion. You try to sneakily put on stolen body cream in the toiletry section of the dollar store perfectly!

I guess you’re expecting that as soon as I got home, I threw out these shoes that had caused me so much grief. And I suppose that’s what I should have done. But unfortunately, I couldn’t. I wanted to see if they might be salvageable after a wash.

They weren’t. Pretty much this exact same situation repeated itself the following week when I tried to wear them out again.

As I stood over the bin in our basement dedicated to “clothes to be donated” (but in reality, it’s just a container in our basement that will remain there forevermore), I second-guessed myself again.

Maybe, just maybe, I could give them another try.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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