Help! I’m 66 and I can’t tie my shoes!
My feet have been a constant source of hardship to me. I walk with duck feet, and the history of my tootsies is littered with ingrown toenails, athlete’s foot, and new-shoe blisters. But one of the chief causes of shame and embarrassment is my struggle with lace-up footwear. So there it is: I don’t know how to tie my shoes to stay tied.
When my parents sent me to a country school, I was five years and ten months old. In those days, there was no kindergarten in Kansas, so I went directly into the first grade. The school building had four classrooms, a small gymnasium with no seating, and a kitchen. Eight grade levels gathered in the diminutive cinder block school, where four middle-aged women taught and administered the programs.
Mrs. Johnston was the first person I ever called teacher. I am sure most of my days in school that first year were happy, but I only seem to remember the trauma. These troubled scenes were only the first of my life archive titled “Teachers I Have Known.” We were expected to learn to tie our shoes. Why my parents did not teach me this lingers as a great mystery. Just as it must be understood that Marley was as dead as a doornail, so my listener must be certain of the fact that I went to this school with laced shoes that I could not tie myself. I also believe that most of my young colleagues were in the same circumstance. That we were an ignorant herd of fall risks is intelligence that will cause something wonderful to come of my shoe story.
I imagine that Mrs. Johnston had a checklist of objectives that each child could reach. Wisely, I think, learning to tie one’s shoes was at the top of the list. Imagine the time it would take to make sure each child kept her shoes tied. Imagine the falls, the scrapes, the bloodshed, and the tears. Nellie Johnston was a woman of imagination, albeit a limited one, as you will see.
The teacher had prepared a pile of rectangular cardboard sheets, each with a whimsical drawing of a shoe. These two-dimensional models had a hole punched where the shoe eyelets should appear and real red cotton laces woven in the traditional criss-cross shape. Each child was given one of these cardboard shoes with the idea that each could follow the teacher’s instructions as she guided their little fingers from the front of the classroom. My problem was she had provided one “shoe” too few, and I was the odd one out. I raised my hand, and she never called on me. I was still raising my hand when she began the lesson. I had never gone to school before, so I was new to hand-raising. I am sure only I remember what happened next sixty years on, but the scene remains vivid. I felt panic internally–I was five years old–and kept raising my hand. She finally saw me and turned to me with a rubicund face and hissed through her teeth, “Liam, we do not allow disruptions in this room. You will take a seat in the back of the room. Now young man!” I felt tears welling up just below the surface as I slinked to the back of the room. The incident prevented me from learning to tie my shoes with the other children. It also cost me relational capital that I never recovered for the six years I attended that school.
Someone may say, “Why didn’t you tell your parents about the incident or ask them for help tying your shoes?” That is a fair question. I have had many years to reflect on the incident to answer this post de facto question. I was the youngest of four boys in a home with high achieving parents one generation removed from immigration. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I was disruptive and did not learn the first lesson in tying my shoes. I determined to figure out how to secure them myself in a way that made sense to one who was a neophyte in every way. I developed a method that failed every day until well into my adult life. In fact, not until I reviewed YouTube videos on the subject did I finally learn to tie my shoes. Because of muscle memory, I still feel the temptation to revert to the old comfortable yet broken way.
What a picture this is of the life of despair! My determination to go my own way rather than ask for the help I clearly needed makes me wonder about many similar issues. How much time I wasted because of a simple thing like loosely granny-knot-tied shoes! How clearly do the angry faces of other sojourners fuel our determination to never be shamed again? This is a story of victimization, but how many forgotten moments have I thoughtlessly controlled–like my teacher? What did I pass on that burned a moment of shame in the memories of others? Kyrie Eleison!
