Funny about shoes

Recently my parents came up for a visit for a few days. They had been planning to take an Alaska cruise for years with some close friends of theirs and finally decided to make it happen. As part of the vacation, they stayed with us for a few days in our Seattle area home before they set sail and met their friends.

My parents have always wanted to do one of those “formal night” cruise pictures because they don’t have hardly any formal pictures of the two of them. The cruise was the perfect excuse to get one of these done, but they both realized they didn’t have formal attire they could wear.

Luckily my dad was able to find an old tuxedo that just needed to be dry cleaned, and for my mom’s dress the family went out shopping and she found a really cute black formal dress at Nordstrom. But that left one major thing left; shoes.

My dad really didn’t have any nice shoes to go with his tux, so he spent some time looking around at different pairs that he might like to no avail. In the parking lot, as we were about to hop in and go to another store he said pointing at my shoes, “you know, what I’d really like to find is a pair of shoes like yours.”

I have some relatively new Clarks that are handmade and really comfortable. They are black leather, and can work well with business casual or semi-formal attire. So I just said, “well why don’t you just try these on?” They fit nearly perfectly – a little small, but still totally comfortable. We were all excited they would work for him and headed on with our day.

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Later, when we got home my mom tried on her new dress (and it was gorgeous!). But when she pulled out her shoes they really just didn’t go that well with this new elegant dress she has bought. And then I got an idea. I knew I had some really beautiful black heels that fit me just a little tight. “Would those fit her,” I wondered to myself as I excused myself from the room and dug them out of the closet.

I brought them back and she tried them on. She loved them, and they went perfectly with her new dress. The only problem was that they were just a tiny bit big for her feet, a problem that was solved with some of those foam pads you can put in the back of the shoe.

So there you have it. We now have a beautiful formal family picture of my parents, both wearing my shoes, that is immortialized in picture albums and the internet. If only everyone knew our funny little family secret.

They said they looked at each other and giggled before they had the picture taken, wondering how many parents could say they both were wearing borrowed clothes from one of their “sons”.

Image Credit: Dingatx