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Bangor Metro >  October 2006 >  Heel Genetics

Illustration by: Leslie Bowman

Lately, I’ve been telling the shoe story. A lot. It’s part of the lexicon of my life.  For decades I owned only two pairs of “shoes”—No. 1 was the Birkenstock sandals, worn year-round, including winter as my “dress up” shoe (envision thick, hand-knit wool socks, usually color-coordinated to the outfit). No. 2 was the winter pac boots with felt liners, which I replaced when needed, sometimes with a name brand liner and sometimes  the generic knock-off. The boots came in military green or dirt brown; the liners were always dreary gray. Often pulled tight over the bottom of my pant leg, the cuff of whatever sock I chose was the extent of my cold-weather fashion statement.

The two-pair-of-foot-apparel-woman definition changed when my daughter was a junior in high school. I was dressing for a wedding reception at the Rockabema Snow Sled Club in Patten and slipping my sockless feet into the Birkenstocks. It was a mild fall day with ribbons of gold and orange and blood-reds shimmering from the ground up into the sky.

My daughter and her friend Amanda said, simultaneously, “No, no, no.” They dragged me into my daughter’s room. “Try these,” they chorused as they handed me a pair of simple black shoes with a pudgy “heel.” How serendipitous that my daughter had recently grown into her adult shoe size, and it was mine. I had to work at the pitch of my body, seeking a gait that spoke certainty and stability, thinking about how I placed my foot down with each step. But I was transformed. When I entered the kitchen, my then-husband told me to take them off, saying, “You don’t wear heels.” Well, yeah, I didn’t. Ever. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t, and so I did. For many years afterwards, every time I found myself near an affordable shoe, particularly heels, I bought them.

I come by this shoe thing genetically, it seems. My Auntie Cathy loved shoes. She wore high heels—all the time—and never threw a pair away. When she died this year and my cousins and their daughters cleaned out her bedroom closet, there were mountains of shoes. Fuchsia. Sequined. Ribboned. Blue-and-white striped. Basic black. All hodge-podged together on the floor.  Shoes from the ’40s and the ’50s, and every decade since. The “shoe” images that her granddaughters carry are funny and sweet and filled with her independence, sometimes bordering on obstinance. High heels for the granddaughter’s soccer games. High heels for the marathon shopping expeditions. High heels on the beach (yes, in her bathing suit and on the sand—well, in the sand). Always high heels.

Today I am shopping for the mother-of-the-groom outfit for my oldest son’s wedding. I’m not shopping for the shoes because I’ve had them for months and months, these kicky black-and-silver sequined spikes I adore. 

“You can walk in those?” everyone keeps asking me. And I can. I feel elegant and perky. And I feel like my Auntie Cathy, a woman who knew her own mind and followed it, no matter whether anybody else understood what that mind was driving her to do or say.

I find a stunning jacket—bright pink with rhinestone buttons—at a trendy Ellsworth shop. And those shoes? Don’t you worry, Auntie Cathy, I wasn’t giving those up. They look fab.



Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced “jah KIH mih deez”) is a writer and visual artist living in Bangor.