#where'sthebarf?

I've been wearing the same tired old pair of winter shoes for five years. I love my beat-up Merrills. They've taken me through mud puddles and ice puddles, across cement sidewalks and gravel driveways all over NW Portland. These shoes are shaped like torpedoes, which means these shoes aren't great for running, but I can kick things with them, like falling trees, attacking dogs, and marauding children, although I haven't actually had to do much of that. The black suede is gray and crusty with dirt and dust. Sadly, the soles are wearing down. I estimate they might give me another five years of service.

I know what you are thinking—five-year-old shoes, and you think they will last another five years? Are you nuts? More to the point, are you completely outside all bounds of respect for fashion?

I can hear your incredulity. I'm amazed you can conjure so much incredulity, considering the state of our national politics, but hey, more power to you. Whatever gets you foaming at the mouth. It takes more than out-of-style shoes to get my heart rate up, but I respect your indignation, whatever prods it to the surface.

I used to be a slave to fashion. To be precise, I was a slave to other people's ideas of fashion. I used to make custom clothing for a living, back in one of my former lives as a . . . well, let's just name it what it was—seamstress!—in Hollywood. Yep, the one in California. My clients brought me pictures of gravity-defying outfits (inevitably designed for a size zero) and demanded I make the outfits for them (in polyester satin, sans beading, in size 16, for my daughter's wedding, which by the way is next Saturday). I know I don't have the right to use the word slave, considering my skin color and life of lower-middle class blue-collar privilege, but maybe some of what I felt in those days was a ghost of slavery. I certainly felt trapped in a horrible job, bent over hot machines doing the bidding of harsh judgmental mistresses.

I guess I have associated fashion with pain, embarrassment, and resentment, which might explain why my current modus operandi is to use things till they disintegrate. It's how I treat my automobiles: drive 'em till they drop. It's how I treat my clothes: wear them until they shred into tiny pieces. So it's no big surprise that is how I treat my footwear.

All that is the long way to announce, in honor of spring, I bought a new pair of walking shoes. I bought them online, which is always a crap shoot, I'm sure you know—the convenience of purchasing in my pajamas is often outweighed by the disappointment of shoes that don't fit and look stupid.

In this case, when I opened the box and saw my new all-black walking shoes, I thought, hmmmm, these look like . . .  old lady shoes! They might as well be Easy Spirits! Humph. Even I have my fashion limits. I'll wear bell bottoms or pegged trousers, I don't care what the shape of my pants is, but I draw the line at wearing Easy Spirits. Probably because they were my mother's preferred brand, before I sold her on the style benefits of Merrills.

I tried these new style-less shoes on with my thick running socks, thinking, well if they don't feel perfectly awesome, I can wrap them up and ship them back, no questions asked. I trotted around the carpet, testing them, tuned to every rub and pinch. My right foot is wider than my left, don't ask me why, which means I must compromise between loose fit on the left and tight fit on the right. I guess my left foot is a 6 1/2 but I buy a size 7 to accommodate my wider right foot. When I buy running shoes, which I wear with a thicker sock, I usually order size 7 1/2s. That means I occasionally look down and experience a shock at how long my feet look.

I trotted around my living room for three days, wondering, should I send them back, should I keep them? Finally, I decided to send them back and try again. I got out the box and checked the soles of the shoes to make sure they were clean . . .  oh, no. What? Between the grooves on the left shoe was smashed an all-too-familiar sight: cat barf! No way!

Well, you know what they say: you step in it, you bought the shoes. Resigned, I took the shoes out to the store yesterday for a little spin and was pleasantly relieved: no blisters, no pain. Today I took them out for a 2-mile hike around the reservoir in the rain. The shoes warmed right up and melted to the shape of my foot. By the time I got home, they fit perfectly.

But I have looked all over my place and I still can't find the pile of cat barf I stepped in. I guess if my sinuses weren't so clogged with allergies, cat hair, and mold spores, I might be able to sniff it out. Maybe someday, or not. I never claimed to be a great housekeeper, a fact I hope my sister remembers when she comes to visit this summer.

I don't care how I look anymore. My shoes might look stupid, but they feel great. I'm greatly relieved. Freedom from pain is worth looking old and foolishly out of style.

It's almost spring . . . time for a little networking!

I've hunkered in my cave long enough. It's almost spring. Time to do a little networking! If you've read any of my blog posts from 2015, you know I think networking is highly overrated. Especially when the facilitators hand you a “Networking Bingo” card with stupid questions like, Find someone who wasn't born in Oregon, and Find someone who was! But tonight I was ready to get out of the house, so I waited on the corner in the freezing rain for twenty minutes for a bus to take me downtown to a networking event.

The event was billed as a speed mentoring event, a chance for entrepreneurs to meet some so-called experts to pick their brains about marketing, strategy, finance, and legal issues. What could be more fun? Thirty entrepreneurs in a new age concrete and wood conference room, milling around trying to avoid eye contact with each other. Ho hum. So been there done that. But I was ready! Let me at that Bingo card!

I was easily the oldest person in the room. I guess I should start getting used to that. The upside to being old, though, is that I don't care what people think about me anymore. I can say anything to anyone. I'll never see them again. And few of these people were likely to be in my target market, so la la la.

The six mentors had to take us two at a time; each entrepreneur was supposed to get fifteen minutes of one-on-one time. Oh boy!

My first two sessions were with marketing experts, a couple of smart, confident women I could have talked with for a long time over coffee. They both valiantly gave me what they could before the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next table.

Actually, my first session lasted only about ten minutes, because my partner hogged the time. I mean, hogged the time. She even came back and gave the mentor a swatch of her unique (and pungent) geranium aroma-therapy oil. I tried not to be resentful.

My third session was with a “strategist,” Josh, a young man with a diffident air. No one else had signed up for that time slot, so I sat alone as I handed him a postcard for my recently published book. He asked me some polite questions, trying to get a feel for my business direction.

I was just drawing a breath to begin waxing poetic about my dream of establishing a small publishing empire when a young woman sat down in the chair next to me and heaved an enormous sigh. My session partner had arrived.

Josh's eyes left me and settled on her. We both stared. She was dressed in a rumpled vintage get up that I might have worn when I was in my twenties, back when I cared how I looked. Her skin was smooth, her lips were red, her eyes were shadowed, her hair was fluffy and pulled up into some kind of shape. She looked messy but real, coy but accessible, and within seconds, I was pretty sure I had her figured out.

“Well, let's let that percolate,” Josh said vaguely, setting my postcard aside. To the newcomer, he said, “Hi, what brings you here?”

“I had a business. Gardening. With my boyfriend. He signed me up, and then he left me. Now I have this business, mostly contract work for walls and walkways, and I don't have insurance, and I don't know what I'm doing,” she said breathlessly, eyelashes fluttering. Her lips were mesmerizing, I had to admit. Josh was certainly mesmerized. The temperature between them ratcheted up a peg. I sat back in my chair and watched.

Her name was something like Nora, and she was on the prowl for attention. Josh was bored and ready to comply. Nora described her business in a self-deprecating way, casting sidelong glances at Josh, and occasionally at me, because I was there, after all. Nobody could deny that I was there, watching. Finally, she ran down, and Josh seemed speechless. Without thinking first, I asked, “What could go wrong?”

“What?”

“What could go wrong? If you don't have insurance...?”

“Yeah, good question,” Josh said.

Nora said a few things, I said some things (devil's advocate is my best role), and Josh pretended to agree. As I listened to Nora talk about her landscaping business, I could tell her heart wasn't fully in it. I know what that feels like, and I've seen it many times in my former students, who were struggling to get associate's degrees in fields they didn't care about.

“It seems like you aren't really into this business,” I said respectfully. “What would you rather be doing?”

Nora took a deep breath. A smile lit up her face. She sat up straight in her chair and waved both arms. I thought, wow, this will be good.

“I want to build a huge garden, twenty acres, with a sauna hut in the middle, in the hills outside of [some town I didn't recognize] in Massachusetts!”

Then she slumped. “But I love my clients!” she moaned. “Their gardens are my babies. The vines and flowers . . . I can't leave my babies.”

“They won't love your gardens the way you do,” I said unsympathetically. “They'll forget to trim those vines and let them grow all over their houses . . .  You'll never get away. Your clients will drain you dry if you let them.”

Nora made a pouty face. I thought, whoops, maybe that was a bit harsh, so I smiled disingenuously to ease the sting. I used to be afraid of young women like Nora, I realized. Looking into her vapid, self-centered eyes, I realized, she doesn't want to be in business. She just wants attention. Then I realized that I was actually talking about myself, about my editing clients draining me dry, and suddenly I couldn't breathe.

I said to Nora gently, “Think about where you want to be in five years, ten years... Don't wait until you are old like me to pursue your dream.”

Josh said, “I know what it's like to detour away from doing what you love.” I thought, hey, something is going on with him, too. I turned my earnest gaze his way and asked, “What detour did you take? What would you rather be doing?”

“I play the upright bass in a jazz band,” he said sheepishly. “I like doing this business thing, but . . .”

“It's hard to make money doing music,” I said. He nodded.

“I have a family to take care of. But I'd really just like to be shredding my bass.” We all sat quietly for a moment, pondering detours and shredded basses. Then Josh shook himself and turned to me. “What about you, what's your dream?”

I reflected for a split second and said, “I'm closer now to my perfect life than I've ever been before. Writing, publishing, making art. It's what I've wanted to do since I was nine years old. And now I'm doing it.”

A few minutes later, the bell chimed, and it was time to move on to the next table.