I have wealthy cousins — men — who judge others by the shoes they wear. When I was a teenager, I remember hearing one of them advise that you could tell if someone was really rich by looking at his shoes.

Shoes were the last thing I was thinking about when my grandmother died on Christmas day, 2006, two days before her 95th birthday. We were at my aunt’s, just starting her Christmas party for family and friends, when my father’s cell phone rang with the news from the nursing home. I was just finishing my first deviled egg.

Grandma Flo was as strong a person as I’d ever met. At 90 she had still bowled every week. She had higher scores than most of the old men. Then she broke her hip and had to be moved from Century Village in Florida, where almost no one she knew was left, to an assisted living facility on Long Island, to be closer to the family. Her mind remained sharp, her sense of humor and wit intact, as her body slowly betrayed her. Then assisted living wasn’t enough, and there was the nursing home. When her eyes and ears got worse and, at the end, her mind started the way of eyes and ears, Grandma was ready. When she died, sad though it was, it wasn’t a great shock. Ninety-five years of health and living long enough to know eight great-grandchildren doesn’t usually make for tragedy. And in any case, there wasn’t time to mourn just yet.

First, there was the Christmas party. I’d driven in from Pennsylvania with my wife and son the night before. For my aunt’s sake, the whole family had been determined to make this a joyous, uplifting day. Her second husband had died at the age of forty-seven a couple of months after the previous year’s Christmas party. She had decided to go through with hosting the party again this year. Even after the phone call from the nursing home, we were trying to treat it like any other Christmas. Each arriving guest was greeted with the news that Grandma Flo had died, and the party went on. Tragedy or not, the food was heating up in tins and those deviled eggs weren’t going to eat themselves.

Second, though it was in fact a family Christmas party, we were in fact Jews (my aunt’s late second husband, like her ex-husband before him, was the ostensible excuse for the decorated tree). And even Jews who attend Christmas parties don’t mess around when it comes to funerals. It might be the next day, or the day after, but no later. In-between accepting condolences and eating lasagna and exchanging gifts, my father had arrangements to make. The funeral would not be the next day — the rabbi wasn’t free until the day after: December 27th, Grandma’s birthday.

That gave me one day to find something to wear. When I’d packed for the anticipated two-day stay in New York, no one had said anything about a funeral. I only had jeans, brown loafers, a sweater, and sweatshirts. You don’t go to your grandmother’s funeral in jeans.

The shirt and tie were easy — my father’s fit me fine. My father also had a black suit jacket that I could get away with. It was big, but it would do.

I couldn’t wear my father’s dress pants. I had the waistline of a reasonably thin man in his thirties. My father was not a man in his thirties. And my brother and brother-in-law are both taller than I am. I considered driving back to Pennsylvania to get my own clothes, but two hours each direction is a long way to go for pants. Even for a funeral. Buying new pants would be a pain — I rarely find my size off the rack and there might not be time to have it hemmed. Fortunately, my brother-in-law’s friend already had plans to fly in with his family from Florida to New York to stay at my sister’s house for the week, and the impending funeral hadn’t changed that. He was about my height, so a pair of black dress pants would be on a flight up the East Coast tomorrow, the day before the funeral.

My only remaining concern was shoes. I have small feet. Depending on the brand and style, I usually wear a seven or seven and a half. No one’s shoes would fit me. I’d have to go shopping. I almost never find shoes in my size and had visions of store after store of futility, all sizes nine and above. Maybe supernatural forces were looking out for me — the dreaded vision didn’t come true.

In a matter of minutes, at a Payless on Bell Boulevard, I found simple black casual dress shoes, size seven and a half. They were sixteen dollars. They didn’t hurt my feet. I bought them and wore them to the funeral the next day with my ragtag assortment of borrowed clothes flown in from across the land. The jacket was too long in the sleeves and the pants stayed up only with the help of a very tight belt. I looked a little like Tom Hanks at the end of Big, when he turns back into a child wearing grown-up clothes. But the shoes were fine, and what a bargain.

My grandmother had lived through the Great Depression and wasn’t one to waste money — she’d drink half a can of soda and plug the hole with tin foil and put it back in the refrigerator for later. She would have been happy to know that I found shoes for her funeral for only sixteen dollars. She’d have been even happier to know that those sixteen-dollar shoes were the same shoes I wore to work each day for months after.

They fit me.

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Tags: fashion & clothing, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein // 2 Comments »