buying a pair of shoes in the 80’s

I was at a friend’s place yesterday when my friend’s ten-year-old brother came in and called out to their mother whom I was talking to, “Mom, I saw a pair of shoes I want to get.” To which their mother promptly replied, “Ok. Ask your sister to go with you. Use your Dad’s credit card.”


That, to me, is pretty impressive. A ten-year-old having that much purchasing power. Well, at least, by virtue of his father’s credit card. Let me explain why.


I grew up in the eighties. And in the provinces. Iloilo, to be exact. Buying a pair of shoes back then and there was an event. An occasion. Almost a pageant. This was how you got your pair of shoes back in the 80’s.


Your father may have just sold the last harvest and got a good price for it or your mother, a public school teacher, just got her paycheck without too many loans to pay for. It doesn’t have to be before enrolment. You might have spent the first few months of the school year with an old pair of shoes, or a more well-off cousin’s hand-me-downs. But tomorrow, for the occasion always starts the day before, you are getting a new pair of shoes. You toss and turn from too much excitement but you don’t mind waking up too early the next morning when mother wakes you up to help her with the week’s laundry. You live in a village where there is no running water. You have a nearby deep well where you lower a bucket several times to fill the basins your mother is using for the laundry. From the first soaking to the rinsing. Where you used to be miserable having to wake up early on a Saturday to let down and pull up a bucket repeatedly down a deep-well, today you are positively powerful. Almost a superhero with your eagerness and tirelessness to fill those basins. Mother shakes her head and smiles a knowing smile when you spill a bucket and almost fall over from excitement. A sense of triumph when you help her pin the last pieces of clothing on the clothesline. A quick bath and you dress up in your Sunday best. It doesn’t matter if Sunday is tomorrow. You have to be in your absolute best today. You have to see how that new pair of shoes looks with your Sunday best. You wait with impatience at how mother is taking her time to dress up. And then how the jeepney bound for the city is taking a while to pass by. Finally, in a cloud of dust, it arrives. No Porsche was ever seen with this much expectancy as this gaudily designed jeepney. Sister is left behind with father. This is in anticipation of how difficult it will be to explain to a five year old why ten-year-old brother is getting a new pair of shoes and she isn’t. She wails as you and mother get on the jeep. You feel sorry for her but you make a mental note to get her something pretty. Or if pretty things are expensive, maybe candy. She adores candy. She’s lost most of her baby teeth to candy.


All the while on the jeep, you feel your insides making loop de loops from anticipation. You can imagine how your classmates will want to step on your new pair of shoes on Monday when you finally come in wearing them. You know you’ll feel a little bad if it gets scratched by their stepping on it but you know it’s inevitable. You decide then and there to wait awhile in the plaza on Monday until the last possible minute before going into the school gate to insure that everybody’s in when you come in with your new pair of shoes. Your new pair of shoes. Your new pair of shoes. Just last week you read about mantras and how one can achieve a euphoric state chanting them. You think you understand what that means. In the longest yet fastest hour, you are now at the Jaro plaza. From there, you and mother will have to take another jeepney to downtown or Karerial. Of course, that’s Calle Real but you don’t know that. It’s pronounced Karerial, so in your mind, it’s Karerial. That Petula Clark sure knew what she was singing about in that song. How can you feel lonely and feel that life is treating you badly when you can always go downtown? How indeed? All those wonderful new-smelling things hanging by the shop windows. But you and mother won’t go and make the rounds anymore. You buy shoes from one store and one store only. It’s that store where a neighbor’s niece works as a saleslady. She doesn’t live in the same town as you do but somehow your mother knows her. Why it has to be there, you’re not really sure. Maybe because mother thinks she won’t be overpriced if she knows somebody from the inside. Maybe the neighbor’s niece gets you an employee discount. Maybe it’s the guarantee that if the shoes prove flawed, you will have an easier time having it replaced. But you’re not really sure. If the neighbor’s niece happened to be waiting on another customer, you wait for her, or she might pass her other customer to another lady. It has to be her or nobody else. And so you look around and you surreptitiously admire the pricier looking ones. Taking an occasional peek at the price tags, you hope that a pair of those that catch your eye comes within the “nod” range. Mother never told you how much the budget is but you more or less know. There’s the “nod” range, and the “slight-twinge” range. Mother and you have a silent language. You know you’re not very wealthy and indulgence isn’t a choice. Then a pair catches your eye. Oh my god. Steel toed black leather. Bully. That one’s just something that appeals to your aesthetics. Underdeveloped aesthetics or developed in the wrong direction maybe because who in the world would you want to kick that badly to want steel-toed shoes? It’s the glint on those steel really. It’s that eye-catching factor. It’s torture. Mother isn’t looking; she’s updating the lady with news of her relatives, so you steal a glance at the tag. It’s in the “slight-twinge” range. You know. You just know. You’re crestfallen. You look for another pair. There’s an unassuming pair that’s tastefully designed there with those fancy looking hole-patterns on top of the shoes. And it’s pointed. Classy. That’s not so bad. You bring it to mother and the lady and she helps you put them on. They’re a perfect fit. Mother is scanning you over. She knows something is wrong. Gone is that boy who was ready to do cartwheels over his new pair of shoes. You know she knows. She just knows. Your eyes are smarting and your vision is blurring and you take one last furtive look at that steel toed pair. She sees. You try to appear to be scanning the other shoes. Too late. She knows. She asks the sales lady to bring over that pair. She does and your world is reeling. You don’t know how you got out of that other pair into this one but somehow you seem to have managed to. You think, “Somebody hold the world still for a minute.” You are delirious. You become aware that mother is talking to you. Have been trying to talk to you. She is asking you to walk around in that pair. You go up to her and you whisper: “’nay, it’s expensive.” She smiles and tells you again, “Walk around in them.” You do. They pinch a little around the big toe and the little toe. But you dare not tell her that they do. By looking at you, anyone would have thought you were Peter Pan, Puss-in-Boots, you’d say Cinderella, or Dorothy but some kids call you sissy already you try to avoid sissy personifications. Mother nods. You feel you are the most blessed boy in the world. Mother is the best mother in the world. And you can be anything you want. The world is a highway and you have a bully pair of shoes. The saleslady helps you out of them and she puts them in a box and mother gives you the money to line up at the counter and pay for them. You feel so grown-up. So proud to own a new pair of shoes. No matter that your feet will be tender and calloused next week from being pinched too much. You don’t know that yet. In a while, you and mother are walking towards Kong Kee, the Chinese restaurant where you always eat when you come to the city. The one with an old lady calling passersby to come in and the perpetually wet doorstep. After that, if your luck holds out, you’ll go to Fatima’s, the ice-cream bar where you might have a banana float. Or if you’re really lucky, a strawberry float. But if you don’t, you won’t feel that bad. In your head you’re already plotting your entrance in school on Monday morning. Maybe you can ask your classmates to step lightly on them. Or you could always threaten that if they don’t, you’ll kick them with a steel toed shoe on the shins…