Wooden Shoes

As soon as I saw them, I knew they were mine. I knew they would fit, and fit perfectly, before I even tried them on. Walking with my mom through rows of metal shelves in my parents’ storage garage, my eyes were drawn to them almost immediately, despite the dim lighting and the seemingly unending piles of flotsam they were half-buried under in the back corner.

Like many families before us, this year mine has discovered the “after” that happens when a loved one passes into the afterlife. After my grandfather’s death this winter, my parents and my uncles plunged head first into sorting and arranging The Estate of Endless Complication and Confusion. It has been an exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes downright unbelievable journey; and one that is unfortunately far from over. For starters, my grandfather was a pack rat. And that is putting it mildly. Believe me when I say I cannot adequately describe the sheer volume of things that my grandfather had squirreled away in his house, basement, attached garage, 4 outbuildings, storage shed, trailer… So much stuff, in fact, that my parents have spent the bulk of the past 5 months simply sorting, packing, and moving the valuables to their storage buildings.

Which is how my mom and dad ended up with a bomb in their garage. No I am not kidding. No it is not live, thank goodness, but yes, it is a WWII-era, 250lb black metal torpedo-shaped incendiary device with the words “practice bomb” printed right on it. (When I asked my dad how he was sure it was, in fact, inactive, he replied, “Well, it didn’t explode on the drive down here.”) Why did my grandfather have this? I told you, he was a packrat. How did he acquire it? We have absolutely no idea. In addition to this large and possibly illegal-in-some-way historic weapon, my parents have now found themselves the guardians of: an approximately 100 piece collection of brass flugelhorns, hundreds of antique guns, fifty-plus grandfather clocks, unopened bottles of brandy from the 1950s, and amazingly, a Ford Model-T and a Model-A. Again, it would be impossible for me to describe the abundance of glass bowls, figurines, tools, bikes, wagons, mirrors, barrels, plates, and so on that my Grandfather accumulated over his 70 years of life. Suffice it say, it will take the remainder of this year to catalogue and appraise it all.

This is how I came to be in possession of the wooden shoes. An exquisite, honey-colored seamless and smooth pair of wooden shoes with the words “Dutch Clogs: Made in Holland” stamped on in the inside. A windmill imprinted in the top of the right shoe, a tulip on the left. My grandfather bought them in Amsterdam during his European deployment in the 1950s and brought them back to the U.S., where they presumably remained in his custody until he died. I never had a chance to ask him about them; indeed until a few weeks ago I didn’t even know of their existence, and I can’t quite explain why I was so drawn to them. Partially because of their uniqueness, certainly because of their superb craftsmanship and near-pristine condition despite spending fifty years in a garage, and likely because of my own Dutch heritage. Something else though… I would like to think that my Grandfather bought them specifically for me. Now, I know technically that’s impossible, but I imagine him winding his way through some narrow Amsterdam alley, seeing the shoes in a shop window, and stopping to buy them for… someone. He didn’t know who. Size-wise they are clearly women’s shoes, and he had any number of women in his life to gift them to: his mother, sisters, cousins, even future wife. But, he held on to them.

Yes, it’s entirely possible that he just forgot about them, or whoever he bought them for didn’t want them or they didn’t fit, or a thousand other explanations for their existence in my Grandfather’s array of lifetime possessions. But they are mine now, and regardless of how they came to me, a part of me believes that they were always meant to be mine. There is no way my Grandfather could have known in 1958 that he would have a Dutch-descended granddaughter with size 7.5 feet who truly loves and collects beautiful shoes…all he knew was that they were something exceptional that he needed to buy. I think about him discovering them, about his lifelong love of adventure and for beautiful and unique things, and I feel connected to him still. I feel connected to those parts of him that live on in me. I look at the wooden shoes my Grandfather bought me, and I am happy.