Sandals

Super Glue wasn't holding the techtonic plates of my sandal's souls together anymore. I'm sitting here praying that this isn't some metaphor...Anyway, I went to throw these guys out — tossed one in the trash, went to toss the other (for two points of course) and had just about the same heart-squeezing, cautionary feeling like the time I was told by some higher power strangling me by my conscience, to stop shooting birds with my bb gun. Just couldn't throw 'em away. I retrieved the first, which made a dramatic roll along the rim of the galvanized trash can, before falling to its sure demise. I took them down to Colin Leary, my ol' friend, who owns Boot Country, and he told me, "Bob, I can throw those away for you." You see, I took them to see if they could survive off of life support. No way. Not even a 2-month prognosis. A few years from now, if a cobbler sees shoes with this much abuse, he'll be obliged to report me to a government agency. Anyway, I told Colin, "No, Thanks Colin. I'm going to screw them to my shop wall." Colin knew where I was coming from. He didn't think it weird at all to save this type of historical time capsule of events. He advised me to use a square-bit screw – a bit out of the normal pattern fer you ladies out there, so that unbelievers wouldn't grab any old Phillips screw driver and take them down. Back home we started looking at the marks on the Birks and Adrien and I got some laughs from the dark red paint streaked across them. It's kind of funny, I'll tell you... I was out in the shop with a brand new Wagner airless painter. The airless was needed to blend a beautiful fade from warm brown to red across a four foot by 12 foot area. I had just finished blending the final color, turned around holding the gun, which has a plastic quart paint holder screwed into the bottom of it, and said to Adrien, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my life, hope I don't have to do that again." And the paint holder fell off the gun. It was almost full of paint. When it hit the floor, it splashed across every surface heading due east at roughly 100 feet per second. It was really beautiful if you didn't have to clean it up -- a gorgeous red wave slapping and staining indiscriminately across the shop until it met a dead end in the garage door. Splat. It missed my sign. Unbelievable since it landed inches away...

A friend of mine uses her husband's old shop boots for planters in the summer. Now that is pure poetry if you ask me – to see beautiful colored flowers coming up out of an dead old boot.