Reflections

I was stopped in my tracks today, while at the gym, by a memory. Stopped, quite literally. In a flash, a smell and a faint sound took me to roughly 1967 or so: Sunday morning, newspaper spread out by the side door (the door we used; the front door off limits--given you'd have to track through the living room and it's carpet--and thus a signal that strangers were knocking if a knocking came there). There on the paper were the Sunday-best shoes of four boys, and one father, lined up in a neat row, either polished to a shine or waiting for their turn with the black or brown polish; and one pair of mother's shoes waiting for the white polish.

It would have been the days when even my father went to church and the entire household would be in a hurry for we were always rushing to get to church.

Shoe polishing was done by my father wearing his tighty whities and a Stanfield's wife-beater (although we never called them that) revealing my fathers shoulders. I think now it didn't matter if the polish stained his hands as they were almost permanently stained by oil and grease, in any event.

Using one hand as a shoe last and the other (two fingers jammed to a point in an old pair of underwear usually) to apply the polish, my father sat on a kitchen chair and leaned into the floor to accomplish his task. This exposed his shoulders, engaged/tensed by the polishing, to his youngest son who nearly weekly would poke the two large dimples (one at each shoulder) and ask a question; the answer to which I already knew. Seems my father had been shot in the war. The bullet entered one side of him and exited the other -- the dimples were the bullet's entry and exit holes, healed over. "Missed everything important." I'm unsure if I ever believed the story but surely doubt was impossible at the young age, and know I desperately wanted to believe.

Back at the gym today, sitting in a corner was a heavy man, black, wearing a robe, fully opened at the front, closer to 60 than 50 years old. His genitals were hanging over the edge of the bench as he was scooted to it's edge so he could fold to the floor where he was polishing a pair of rich-brown wingtip dress shoes. The smell that hit me was the polish, of course. It was the old kind in the round tin with the small butterfly widget thingy which one uses to pry the top off the tin. The sound was the movement of an actual shoe shine brush moving quite lovingly over the leather of one of the shoes.

When he paused I told him his shine had just taken me back a few decades to Sunday morning, my father getting our shoes ready for church. His smile set his eyes on fire with kindness and his own memory. He used to have to take turns with his brothers to shine the shoes for church, but never on Sunday. His father was a pastor and the job had to be done on Saturday night, to help keep the Sabbath as free of labour as possible. We agreed nobody shines their own shoes anymore, not the real way anyway.

I thanked him for prompting the memory and he said the shine was doubly good then -- he had polished shoes and I had the shine from a warm memory.