Training Shoes

I get a kick out of Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray. Even though they’re getting on in age, they’re a hoot to be around. They’ve been retired for years but are never idle. It seems to me that they have more energy than most people half their age. They’re both characters in their own way but as different from each other as night and day. Uncle Ray is wise and thoughtful and partial to long philosophical conversations. Aunt Helen is warm and bubbly and never has anything bad to say about anyone. She veers away from any topic that’s at all controversial, but she’ll talk your ear off about gardening, cooking and dogs, cats and birds and the like. Despite their differences, they seem to share a common outlook on life that keeps them active and cheerful. I don’t know if one adopted the other’s ideas or if they independently developed attitudes that are totally in sync with each other. In any case, they’re a perfect couple.

The other day I happened to be in their neighborhood and thought I’d drop by and pay them a quick visit. But a quick visit is never in the cards when it comes to Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray. As soon as Aunt Helen opened the door and saw me, she gave me a big hug and pulled me into the house, calling to her husband to come and see who was there as she did so. I barely had a chance to mumble that I couldn’t stay long.

“You came at the perfect time,” she sang out, either not hearing or ignoring what I said. “Lunch is just about ready. Your uncle has been cooking up a storm.”

I was about to explain there was no way I could stay for lunch. but before I could get a word out I was hit by a wonderful aroma wafting out of the kitchen. I’m a pretty well-disciplined guy but one temptation I can’t resist is a fine meal, and that is something I could always count on in this house. Aunt Helen was an excellent cook. Her lasagna is the best I ever tasted and I’d have to say the same for her chicken fricassee and stuffed cabbage. Everything she cooked always turned out exactly the same every time she made it – an amazing feat, as anyone who prepares food knows.

Uncle Ray, approaching me wearing a faded blue and white striped apron.

“What in the world are you cooking?” I asked as he pried me away from my aunt and enfolded me in a bear hug.

“It’s a bit of an experiment,” he responded in his self-deprecating way. He called everything he cooked an experiment and his culinary style was totally different from that of his wife. He never followed recipes the way they were written but fooled with them in unexpected ways. His experiments were almost always successful but couldn’t be replicated or shared because he didn’t make notes of what he did. He claimed that he didn’t like writing things down while he was cooking because it interfered with his concentration and besides, he never knew if a recipe was worth saving before a dish was done and afterwards it was too late because by then he’d forgotten all the steps and ingredients. I like to fool around in the kitchen myself and I once or twice I asked Uncle Ray for the recipe of a particularly tasty dish he made. He just scratched his head and said it was the ordinary stuff with a little of this and that. It was never enough to go on for me to duplicate what he made. He himself never prepares the same dish twice in the same way. He’d rather play around making something new than try to recapture a past success.

“That smells so good!” I exclaimed, my mouth watering.

“Do you think so?” he asked with an impish smile. “I’m a little worried about this one.”

“The aroma is amazing. What is it?”

“I guess it smells okay,” he allowed, “but we’ll see how it tastes. It’s kind of a ragout but not really because it has peanuts, bean sprouts, ginger and lots of other stuff that don’t belong in a ragout.” The dishes Uncle Ray cooked up usually didn’t have names since they were unique. We’d refer to his past creations by saying things like, “Remember that pork dish with cabbage and pineapple that we had a couple of years ago before the Super Bowl game?” He continued, “It’s kind of a hybrid, I guess – in other other words, a real mess. But you never know what will work ‘till you try, right?”

As he spoke he edged me toward the dining room where Aunt Helen was already setting the table for three.

“Oh, no,” I protested weakly, my resolve already shattered. “I couldn’t possibly stay for lunch,” but even as I spoke I knew I had no chance against the cajoling of my aunt and uncle and the enticing aroma filling the room.

Needless to say, the meal was delicious. We ate without speaking, so absorbed were we with the food on our plates. Uncle Ray may be fussy in the way he prepares a meal, using only the best ingredients and blending herbs with the precision of a scientist, but he eats with gusto, like a longshoreman, not a food connoisseur. We followed his example, shoveling spoonfuls of the concoction into our mouths instead of savoring each morsel as we should have. In no time, we had gobbled up as much of the “ragout” as our bellies could contain. When we were done, we sat there, exhausted.

That’s when I brought up the matter of the governor. We don’t usually talk politics and I don’t know why I mentioned it except that it was on my mind. It was the big news of the day, plastered over the front pages of the tabloids and blaring from every news program, not just locally but nationally. It was what they were talking about on the car radio as I pulled up to the house. Big scandal! That’s nothing new in politics, of course. Politics and scandal go hand in hand like coughing and sneezing. Nobody’s surprised when scandal hits a political figure, or any public figure for that matter. I wasn’t so much surprised as disappointed. I voted for the guy. Urged other people to vote for him too. And now here he was, totally disgraced. I was disgusted with him and myself for endorsing of him, not that my endorsement was worth anything.

“Look at the blue jay at the feeder,” Aunt Helen exclaimed, pointing at the back porch. “He’s been coming the same time every day for at least three weeks. Isn’t that amazing? You can set your watch by him.”

I didn’t take the bait. You could count on Aunt Helen to change the subject whenever something distasteful to her is brought up. Normally I would have fallen for it but I guess I was too obsessed with the governor’s offenses and I couldn’t let it go. “Oh, yeah,” I said distractedly, glancing out the window, but stubbornly returning to the matter on my mind. “What do you think they ought to do with him?”

“The jay?” asked Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray in unison.

“No, no, the governor,” I cried out in irritation. I thought I noticed the shadow of a smile cross my uncle’s face, but it might have been my imagination. Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray didn’t share my indignation. To tell you the truth I wish to hell I could be more like them, but I get riled up easily and can’t let go of things. It’s a bad habit that I should kick, but, well, I guess I still had to work on that. “If he’s not kicked out of office for this,” I went on, “there’s something wrong with the system, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Uncle Ray replied noncommittally. “Of course we don’t know the whole story yet so there’s not much point worrying about it now.” Aunt Helen had already left the table and busied herself in the kitchen, wanting no part of the conversation.

“We know enough, “ I countered. “If even a fraction of what they’re saying is true we know he’s an irredeemable sc . . .” I was going to say scumbag, but that’s not the kind of language you use around Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray, so I finished instead with “scoundrel.”

“Well, we’re all scoundrels in one way or another, aren’t we?” my uncle responded.

He had a point there. The fact is my own life had its rough spots. Even though I think of myself as a generally decent and responsible kind of guy, I’ve done stuff I’m not especially proud of. I guess everyone has. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the governor when I had plenty of faults of my own. Even though I never did anything approaching the vileness of what he was accused of, I wasn’t blameless and shouldn’t have been so upset about the whole business. Nevertheless, I stammered, “There’s no excuse for what he did,” clinging to my sense of outrage even as it started to be undermined.

Uncle Ray considered what I said and replied, “Maybe not, but we’ll just have to see. Right now we have sensational headlines from the press that profits from sensational headlines, and lots of noise from political enemies and rivals who benefit from his disgrace.”

I was already thinking along the same lines. Some of my escapades, if they were related by an unsympathetic source unable or unwilling to provide the full context could sound bad, much worse than they actually were. And even though I get along pretty well with most people I’ve run into a few difficult sorts who would relish an opportunity to get me into trouble. For someone in the public eye like the governor, who had a lot more temptations and opportunities to misbehave than I ever did, and whose critics were always ready to jump all over him, a lot more would be made of anything he did that was at all indiscreet. But what was I thinking? What he did wasn’t just indiscreet, it was downright criminal.

“Do you think,” I asked, “that there could be an excuse for what he, well, “allegedly” did?” Uncle Ray is reluctant to criticize others. I wish I could be more patient and understanding instead of getting ticked off so easily. I don’t know why I’m so critical of others, but for some reason it really rubs me the wrong way when someone does something bad and gets away with it. I want miscreants to be punished, to face retribution. But Uncle Ray takes everything in stride, without getting perturbed or irritated, and I admire that. Yet there I was still trying to push him to see things my way instead of following his lead. Go figure. “What reason could there be?” I insisted.

“For anything that happens,” my uncle asserted, pulling on his mustache, “there’s a reason. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened.”

You can’t argue with logic like that. It made perfect sense. I could understand it but still not accept it. “When I first heard the story,” I said, “I tried to empathize, to put myself in his shoes and think how I might have acted, and I wouldn’t have done what he did in a million years.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t have,” Uncle Ray affirmed generously, “but it wasn’t you in his shoes, it was someone very different from you in lots of ways, someone with a different upbringing and genetic makeup and a different way of thinking. We can’t even guess what factors were involved if the story is even true in the first place. You can empathize with him to the extent that you are similar, but you can’t really understand a person’s motivations without being that person. Standing in his shoes isn’t enough. You need to do more – to have his soul.”

“Did you say your shoes need new soles, dear?” asked Aunt Helen emerging from the kitchen with a tray of cookies and three mugs of coffee. “I noticed yesterday that your shoes were pretty worn out and I was going to say something about it to you. I think you should just get a new pair, though, and not bother re-soling them. It isn’t worth it.”

“You’re absolutely right, honey,” my uncle replied, not missing a beat. Bending down and pretending to examine his old loafers he confirmed, “No use trying to repair these old things.”

It cracked me up to see how my uncle responded to his wife as if we really had been discussing the state of his shoes. At first I thought he was just humoring her and then realized that he was able to effortlessly pivot to a new conversation as if that really was what we had been talking about. He was like a stream flowing along that could turn in a new direction and just keep on going. A second later it hit me that Aunt Helen knew damn well we weren’t talking about the condition of his shoes. She was trying to shift the conversation away from a topic she didn’t care for. And she did it!

These gentle, generous old people outplayed me every step of the way. I realized, to my surprise, that I no longer cared about the governor and what he did or didn’t do. I was over it. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was stuck until Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray got me unstuck. Maybe some day I’ll figure out why I’m bothered by the things that bother me and maybe even get them to stop bothering me so much. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll ask Uncle Ray for his old shoes so that next time I get worked up about something unimportant I can use one to give myself a good kick.