Published: September 07, 2009 12:04 am         

The Off Season: A pair of boots worn well…

It was on a breezy Saturday morning trip through our barn’s double doors that I happened to notice a pair of my old work boots in the trash barrel we keep there. It is in that place that much of what we have worn out or used up ends, just junk taking a last bow before meeting up with landfill dirt.

I had tossed the boots into a garage trash can at the beginning of the summer, an ungrateful end for something I had worn so often for close to 15 years, through winter snows and early spring heat, in wet weather and through the dust of many an Indian summer day. My wife picked them out of the can and brought them to me as I finished trimming a little patch of grass near the house.

“Sure you want to get rid of these?” she asked me, holding them up and away from herself because there was hardly a clean spot on them.

“Oh, I think so. They’re just so worn out, I don’t think I can wear them to do anything anymore,” I told her. “I hate to do it, but throw them away.”

She took me for my word.

It hadn’t been easy to give up those boots. A man gets attached to things like that grubby pair of shoes, unless they rub blisters on his heels, which another pair of much more expensive boots I own does unless I wear thick winter socks with them. I could have broken those new boots in a good while ago if I had wanted to invest the time in elbow grease, but I continued to slip on my old pair, instead — it was easier.

I have known artists who hang on to paint brushes that they’ll never use again, housewife cooks who just can’t throw away cracked bowls or dented pans that served them too well to discard, and gardeners who keep bent shovels, worn hoes and toothless rakes because they can’t say goodbye. It may not be very logical for us to do these things, but it is human, and I am about as human as they come, particularly when it came to those boots.

Before the day I told my wife to move them to the barn trash, I must have taken the boots out of that garage can a half-dozen times, only to realize that I was never going to get them re-soled or that I had no intention of putting new laces through their shabby eyelets again. They were shot, so I finally decided that I might as well start wearing a pair of hiking shoes that still had plenty of life left in them for yard work and spreading gravel and painting window trim.

But actually seeing the boots in the barn that day as they sat on a pile of discarded garden hose and empty paint cans and the usual grime and lint and crud from a brisk sweeping of my tool shop, made me think about the jobs I’ve done in them, the miles I’ve walked in them, the blood and sweat that’s dripped down my hands and arms onto their cracked and faded toes.

That particular pair of boots had its start on my feet after I needed a pair to wear with blue jeans and T-shirts and on occasions that called for something casual and clean. But one day, in need of a pair of anything to head out to the barn, I grabbed them since they were closest to the door. From that day on, I started wearing them for work, eventually to dig ditches for new drains for my house, to paint my barn, to build my deck, to clean fencerows and bale hay, to cut the woods back from the yard, and to tackle countless other chores.

Those boots nearly became a part of my feet; I walked my walks in them, kicked footballs in the front yard with my son in them, wore them to the feed store, and laced them up for camping trips and tours of our crawlspaces. I have used and abused them.

Another pair of boots memorable in my life was my father’s.

My dad finished acres of concrete, pulled miles of wire through houses, and ran a river’s worth of plumbing in his lifetime, and his boots always looked worn and tired, perhaps as worn and tired as he was. I remember a time when he had trouble finding work, and he came home to tell my mom that he could make good money working on a job in Oregon for part of the summer. Since we had but one car to drive, he told her he would take a bus one way, but would have to hitchhike the other, something I couldn’t appreciate until I learned how to read a map.

The night my dad walked through our back door, thousands of miles and a few months behind him, he sat down in our living room and was soon asleep, his feet propped up on a re-upholstered foot stool that was much older than I was. I remember that I could see his socks through the quarter-sized holes in the soles of his boots, and it was then, I think, that I came to realize just how much my dad loved us for he had walked that far and that long to come home.

You know, we marvel at the extraordinary when we see it. We are awed and confounded by, arrogant and confident in new technologies that shape and change our lives. I sit before my television and the satellite feed it receives; I use my cell phone, cook in a microwave, send e-mails over great distances, and listen to crystal-clear voices from 4-inch-wide disks of plastic. We fly through the air and beat diseases and manufacture all sorts of things that make our lives easier without ever really knowing how they work, or even caring to know.

But every so often, I think we should take wonder in everyday things, in the ordinary, in the commonplace and the undistinguished, like a pair of boots that has walked good distances with us.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Mike’s second book, “Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories…” is due to be published in the fall. You can visit his Web site at mikelunsford.com.