Plain White Tennis Shoes
Tamara Howard

It seemed like a good day. It was clear and crisp for early December, not frigid and wintry. My husband and I settled into a comfortable booth by the windows, said grace, and began to enjoy our Pizza Hut lunch. I looked up from a bite, and I noticed a mom and two young boys walking by our table. The mother wore a simple buttoned-front blouse and full skirt falling modestly beneath her knees. Her sons giggled and picked at her until she looked down upon them with a forced frown that quickly morphed into a wide smile of understanding. After reaching their booth, the young warriors used the proven method of “rock, paper, scissors” to settle their seating dispute. The winner shared the throne beside “Princess Mom” while the gracious younger prince let his attention fall upon the dangling light that hung over their table. Not meaning to stare, I glanced back to Jerry and took another bite. When the family passed by again on their way to the salad bar, something else caught my eye.

The dark-haired middle-aged woman wore a pair of plain white canvas tennis shoes laced up and neatly tied. Neither their originality nor their beauty made an impression but rather their lack of. Just seeing them on her maternal frame caused me to get all choked up inside. I looked away, but it was too late. The innocent catalyst had ignited what I had for weeks tried to smother.

My eyes immediately misted, and I felt a slight burning in my nostrils, strange but way too familiar. Heart pounding, feeling the veins throbbing toward my skull, my breathing labored. I forced my throat to accept the bite that wanted to expand and end the misery. Once again the intruding melancholy was bent on destroying an afternoon respite. Gone from my reality were the smells of pizzas and pastas, onions and spices, colognes and the lack of. All my senses converged upon my need to stay in control of my emotions. I could not lose it. A breakdown was not an option.

“What’s wrong?” Jerry asked, his brow furrowed with concern. He found himself asking me that question a lot and wondering how on earth he could help me.

Unable to speak, nodding my head from side to side, I felt a smile begin but the warm tears spilling down my cheeks disagreed. I swiped the unwanted traitors with a napkin, headed to the ladies restroom praying that it would be unoccupied. I knew that if I could not control it right then, the next phase would be louder and much more embarrassing. Once inside the makeshift confessional, head in hands, I fought to take long deep breaths, inhaling the life ahead of me and exhaling the past I could not change. Salty tears dripped carelessly from my quivering chin. Some fell onto my bosom, baptizing my broken heart with the tender warmth found in a mother’s goodnight kiss. Such a kiss given with no expectation of recompense, no delusions of value or remembrance of grievance past. A kiss so soft the slumber is not disturbed yet the sleepy child knows that, indeed, it has been planted and she is somehow better off having received its blessing.

My eternally beautiful mother had entered into final rest just a couple weeks before. Her soul’s casing lay beneath the cold ground in our family cemetery. Mounds of her favorite flowers, once vibrant as she was but now frozen and wilted, marked the spot. I could look out from my window and see the decay.

Those little white laced-up canvas shoes, how many pairs had she worn out in her lifetime? Their soles at first treaded like the peel of an orange, later banana peel smooth due to walking the holler roads, working in the garden and running down two rambunctious little boys. Many times I have seen the front of the shoes worn threadbare from the pressure of her toes straining to fit, though they had been washed and dried by the sun so many times they had shrunk one full size. And if a toenail’s friction succeeded in creating a hole, that pair of shoes was demoted to “workin’ shoes,” but only after a new pair was recruited to take their place, and sometimes that took a little time. Money was tight as the shoes that needed replacing. Until then, those shoes would be washed and doctored with another coat of white shoe polish should she need to go anywhere outside the family circle.

So why does it even matter that my mom always wore bargain store white canvas tennis shoes? It matters because she tried her best to see to it that I didn’t always have to wear them. I let that fact settle into my being, as matter-of-factly as the knock on the bathroom door. Those simple shoes were as much a part of who she was as they were a part of who she helped me to become. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose with the toilet paper provided. A quick look in the open door and gladly found my husband waiting there.

I knew there was a lot he needed to know about my relationship with my mother, as much for me as for him. He had only known my mom, Jackie, as the weakly, aging, needy, dementia-prone woman who one never knew what to expect of.

As we walked from the restaurant toward our pickup truck, I began: “My mom used to wear white tennis shoes like that. . .”

This is dedicated to my beautiful mom, Jacqueline Bolen, who passed away November 24, 2006. She did the best that she could, and I wish I could thank her for that. I love and miss her.

Tamara Kay Howard, of Garrett, says she writes of things that “come from the heart.”