T. GAMBLE: A valuable lesson on the importance of clean shoes

Recently, I had a discussion with a friend who was talking about trying to cut down on his cussing. He then said something that struck me as funny. He said, “I really don’t cuss much except when I’m trying to get the family ready for church.” That made me think back to my childhood days and the struggle that existed in everybody getting ready for church.

As you might imagine, going to church was not the top priority for 10-year-old T. Gamble. I did believe in God and was very fearful I might go to hell. Brother Eldridge made sure I was reminded of this possibility on a weekly basis. But sitting through church was pure torture, as my mind raced to thoughts of playing baseball, swimming in the pool or eating watermelon. My mother had to round me up and make me take a bath, get dressed in Sunday best, which of course I hated, and, most importantly, shine my shoes.

I would have made a very poor Marine. I hate to shine my shoes. I do not know why. Worse yet, back in those days instead of putting the paste polish on the shoe and then shining it good, I was allowed to simply use some shoeshine polish. Shoeshine polish came in a bottle with a stopper that had a rod with a round absorbent bulb on the end. You’d dip the stopper in the container and then just wipe the fluid on your shoe. There was no rubbing out a shine; it was fast and easy. Well, fast and easy, except for me. I still hated it.

To do the job properly, one should first clean the shoe really well. Then one should brush on the new polish, which did not really polish but it did cover up scrape marks and scuffs.

This may come as a surprise, but I managed to scrape up a pair of Sunday shoes faster than Rosie O’Donnell can eat pecan pie. Well, I couldn’t really be bothered to clean the shoes up first before adding the polish. Who really needs all that? Besides, who even looks at a 10-year-old’s shoes at church anyway?

Well, for starters, my mother, just to name one. I had last worn my Sunday shoes at church on a rainy day and had stomped around in every mud puddle from Parrott to our house in the country. The heels of my shoes now had large clumps of mud all the way around. I could not be bothered to remove this old dried mud. It would eventually just fall off anyway. So I did what any red- blooded, south Georgia 10-year-old country boy would do. I just polished right over the top of those mud clumps, and if I must say so myself, it looked pretty good.

Unfortunately, I was cursed with a mother who had a more discerning eye than me for proper fashion and formal wear. Pretty good, to me, ranked somewhere between God-awful and horrifyingly disgusting to my mother. She took one glance at my well-polished shoes, and had Steven King been present he would have hired her immediately to be the next woman with a petrified look on her face for his next horror movie. I wasn’t sure if she would fall over dead right there before my eyes or instead strike me dead, but I was pretty sure either way it was not about to work out too well for me.

My mother comes from an ancient tribe of women who genetically believe that if a child has committed a serious wrong, the only proper thing to do is to grab the nearest available object suitable for whipping a child and begin immediately. If I was lucky, it was the fly swatter that normally sat on top of the refrigerator. A wooden spoon might work fine. A frying pan could be considered. A yard stick was considered an excellent option.

I was many years from becoming a lawyer, and I had no reasonable defense to put forth. She glared at me with a mixture of pure anger and sorrow. Anger because I knew darn well that I should clean the shoe first. Sorrow that I could be so sorry to just paint over the mud. You know, sort of a realization that maybe your kid isn’t panning out to function in the real world.

As you might imagine, I ended up cleaning my shoes, polishing them and going to church, where I was sure not one other person in the entire universe cared about the condition of my shoes or my discomfort now in sitting on those hard church pews. The cause of the discomfort will remain unspoken, but I guarantee you now I clean my shoes before I polish them.