Midwest Memo
Boot scootin'
by Alan Shultz

I'm told that vinegar will take out the ugly salt lines that now crystalize on my favorite black dress shoes. I got that nugget in a little unsolicited advice thrown my way as I walked into the lobby of an office building yesterday. After I turned down the shoeshine guy for lack of time he yelled out his vinegar gem.

Granted, my shoes do look pretty pathetic. And I'm not sure vinegar or any form of polish or salad topping is going to restore my wingtips.

This turn of events comes despite the fact that I live in a fashion free zone when it comes to our grueling Midwest winters. I'm not too proud to don stocking cap or ski mask, tuck my hands into thick wool mittens and pull on a good pair of galoshes. I've got mufflers that don't match anything, stretchy knit gloves for under the mittens and battery-powered socks for the very worst weather. I've got just about every inch of me covered, that is, if a good pair of galoshes could be had.

For years I've had a pair of Totes brand form fitting shoe rubbers for my dress shoes. These gems have apparently fallen from favor in the general public since one of the 20- somethings in my family said he had never seen such things.

Well, folks have heard me coming down the corridor in my Totes for years. They make a clop, clomp, clump sound that's rather unique. Their other property is that they retain moisture in the grooved bottoms so that one is always sitting in a small melted puddle if they are left on inside.

Because my fashion form-fitting Totes are tight to pull on, they require an elaborate onelegged hopping dance to get them over my shoes. If I believed in such things, reflecting on this dance it appears to mimic tribal dances of old calling for rain. Perhaps, inadvertently, I have been dancing the snow dance all these years, calling on the skies to dump yet more of the white stuff down upon us.

Anyway, it was during one of my one-legged Totes dances last week that my right foot rubber split down the middle and I was left shoe naked to the slush and snow and puddles and drifts awaiting me outside.

A trip to the shoe store did not solve my problem.

Perhaps it was my choice of shoe stores. It was an enormous self-serve affair with boxes and boxes of other people's shoe sizes. The young folks who staffed the store all wore earphones for their I-pods. My interruptions asking for help and directions were terrible, unforgivable annoyances to these folks.

I was on my own.

More than once I had to double check whether I was really in the winter section

for shoe apparel. It does

seem that folks have sacrificed

function to style when it comes to snow protection. Most everything I looked at was good for a little dusting of snow. But the real stuff, the piles of snow and the frozen mounds of ice, well what I was looking at just didn't stand up.

I wound up with the extreme other end of my sought after Totes. These lumberjack boots are stiffer than plywood and cut the back of my legs like I've never experienced before. The lacing on these boots is similar to hockey skates with both holes for the laces and also those metal clips that one weaves in and out and across. No one-legged hopping to put these clod hoppers on. I've got to sit down on the floor to have a hope of getting both on and laced up properly.

The thing is, one can choose poorly in winter where to sit down on the floor to "lace up." If you're in a spot where some Totes wearing fellow has just been, well, you're sitting in a little pool of water and then you've moved on to a new problem.

Turn up your I-pods you young store clerks, the old crabby guy is now looking for snow pants.