SATURDAY RUMINATIONS

This is what can happen when you take an old pair of boots in to be repaired.



Cobbler

It’s a narrow, dark shop, twelve and a half feet wide and twenty-five feet deep. There are two partitions along the depth; a battered counter where the old man writes his receipts with a shaking hand and a wall further back with a door-less door and a glassless window.

Through the door back there, I can see a lumpy couch heaped with ancient blankets and pillows. I know by the way the old man touches the pillows with his hand and his eyes that this is where he naps. Probably during the many hours when there are no customers, he sits on the couch to rest for just a minute knowing that if his body slides down to sleep, the little bell over the front door will wake him.

He isn’t sleeping the day I push the door open, only considering it. He comes from the side of the back room I can’t see. I imagine a desk on that wall and a straight back wooden chair. The top rail of the chair might be grimy from the liquids of his trade, shoe polish and oil. But when he shuffles up to the counter and puts both his hands flat on it, they’re clean. Age is their only stain.

He greets me in a quiet voice thickly accented but his eyes are on the worn cowboy boots I’ve set on his counter. He knows what care they will need even before he picks them up. I try to guess how many boots he’s held, how many years he’s given new life to worn out shoes.

When he tells me apologetically that it will take seven days to fix my boots, I don’t mind. My closet is full of boots and shoes.

And then I think of days long past when a customer might have shouted or begged for the work to be done right now. Their anger only camouflaging the fact that the shoes brought to be repaired were the only shoes they had, or worried that their other Sunday shoes could not carry them through a hard day of work. I think of the wealth in my closet and feel some shame along with a new respect for his trade.

I ask his age. “Seventy-eight,” he says proudly. And I wonder, from child to boy to man, how many feet he’s kept warm and dry by his labors? Through three or four generations of families I would guess, it might even have been my grandfather’s feet, my father’s, and now mine.

I tell him I came the day before but he was closed early. He waves his hand towards the parking lot explaining, “It gets dark so early now and I live thirty miles away.” This I understand from sitting alone inside my own business for years staring out fearfully at the dark. In the winter I locked my door at dusk and closed the window shades. Two years ago, a jeweler was robbed and murdered five doors down from the cobbler. It’s a dangerous world we live in. I make a mental note to come back before dark next week.

He gives me ½ price on part of the work and I think it’s because we’ve talked, but it might be because those boots are thirty years old and I still have them.

“Have a good night,” I say as I leave, and he wishes me the same. When I look back I see that he is still holding my boots and maybe thinking about how he will resurrect them.