Shoes in Toulouse

On a Friday in San Malo, five days into our trip, I noticed that about an inch of stitching on the little toe side of my right shoe had come out. The top part and the sole part were holding things together, but I worried about the future. It had taken a long time to find these perfect walking shoes, and so far I hadn’t seen anything in any French store that could match them for practicality. The French shoes easily outdid them for style -- not even a contest there, but I wouldn’t want to walk 10 miles a day in them.

However, I ignored the problem until Saturday afternoon when, urged on by Mary (sick and mostly sleeping, remember?) to get it fixed. Both of us were sure we’d seen a shoe repair place nearby, so I went searching. After an hour or so, I gave up and went back to the hotel. Oops. There it was, right across the street, just a tiny doorway and a sign on the door that said I’d missed him by 45 minutes. I was actually relieved.

My sense of adventure was dead in the water when it came to facing a “Cordonnier.” It takes me longer than it should to build up courage about certain unpredictable things. I never know when I will be brave and when I won’t. Why a shoemaker panicked me, I don’t know, but it did.

Mary was determined. She likes to have things right. She didn’t mention my shoe at our next stop, Tours, but that’s only because she was still a bit sick. By the time the train and metro delivered us to Toulouse and the Garden Hotel, she had recovered enough to be pushy. As soon as we got settled, she went to ask the concierge to find me a shoe repair place.

Returning to our room, she eagerly placed a map before me and told me what she thought the concierge had said. “We” were somewhere around “here” or maybe “there”, and the shoe place was close to “there” or maybe “here”.

I was trapped. Map in hand, I asked for clarification from the concierge, hoping it would be so far away that I couldn’t go until tomorrow. After all, it was getting toward evening already.

The concierge showed me where we were on the map, and then where the cordonnier was, very very close. She then walked me to the door, pointed down the street to the corner, said “A droit” (right) two blocks, where there would appear a huge shopping center with a shoe repair place at the address she wrote out for me. Yes, he would still be open! Go!

It seemed a lot easier when she said it, so off I went, courage high.

The cordonnier was almost too busy to notice me, but I called out, “Bonjour, Monsieur,” like you always do when entering a business or shop. Reluctantly, it seemed, he turned from his work to tell me he had no time.

“But it’s my only shoe,” I whined in French.

He gestured around his shop at the shelves full of shoes and said, “Vous n’etes pas la seule.”

I was not the only one. Then he went on to explain that he would have to take my shoe now, glue it, keep it overnight, then sew it tomorrow, and he simply did not have time to do it no matter what!

That wasn’t what I’d expected. Even if he could have taken it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to walk around in one shoe until it was ready sometime the next day, so I left feeling gloomy.

Next door was a Supermarket, a real one with food and an amazing variety of other goods. As I went in search of snacks and cheese, I suddenly recalled the cordonnier’s words about gluing my shoe. I hurried over to a section with tape and other adhesives, and found Super Glue!

Victorious, back I went to the Garden Hotel with the excellent snacks and the ever-useful super glue. When I showed it to the concierge, she smiled and said, “Tres bien,” agreeing that my problem with the shoe was solved.

Mary doubted, but I went to work and in minutes, my shoe was fixed. I held it tight for about 3 minutes, and ever after it held no matter how much walking I did. In fact, it still holds.

There are ways to do things when the obvious ones aren’t available.

Mary didn’t like my solution. It bothered her that my shoe was not stitiched properly, even if the glue held perfectly well. In fact, she continued looking for a cordonnier in the next several places we went. Perhaps my impatience with this finally got through to her because there came a day when she didn’t mention it any more.

We learned a lot about ourselves and each other on this trip. That was one of my purposes for going. After a certain age, I think many of us want to know what our lives have added up to, what we know, and how the shortened path ahead can be made the most fruitful for both ourselves and others.

My lessons through Mary were often painful. When troubled, I’ve always written down my feelings to help make sense of what I’m going through. I couldn’t do this with my daily trip journal because Mary used it to jog her memory while writing her own journal.

I resorted to writing the real personal thoughts on scraps of paper which were then poked into the secret compartments in my backpack. When I got back and pulled them out, some of them were ridiculous. Writing them had expunged the devil inside so that I no longer needed them. Into the trash they went. A few others, I kept. I’ll share them later.

As Mary and I came to understand each other, we each gave way, not a lot, but some. Later, when my purse strap broke, my solution [too complicated to explain] was ingenious but sloppy. Mary’s expensive super-thief-proof purse with the steel-core strap developed a rip, with the sharp end poking out in an annoying way..

And so we hobbled along, super-gluing our friendship closer through these little diversities and troubles.