These boots were made for ?

This month's "Readers Write" prompt at the Sun is "Shoes." Here is my short contribution.


When I was 13, every cool kid in my school wore brown, six-eye Doc Martens. The specifications were important. Black “Docs” meant you were goth. Twelve-eye Docs meant you were weird. But six-eye, brown Docs meant you were preppy, cool.

I didn’t own a pair.

Never mind that my hair was two colors -- the result of a bad Sun-in Highlight job and ever-emerging roots -- or that I was bossy and awkward. Never mind that I tucked in my t-shirts or that my mother still applied my makeup in the morning. My entire future would be changed, I thought, if I owned a pair of brown six-eyes.

I knew we couldn’t afford a pair. The cheapest pairs cost more than $100, and my parents had filed bankruptcy. They owed thousands of dollars in medical bills. My mother hadn’t bought a new pair of shoes for herself in half a dozen years.

I didn’t ask for Docs, but I must have talked about them because one Saturday morning, my mother woke me up early. “Get dressed,” she said. “We’re going to the mall.”

She took me straight to Gadzooks, an alternative store filled with Mossimo t-shirts and Girbaud jeans. She kept walking until she reached the back of the store where the Docs -- every color and size I could imagine! -- lined the wall.

“What size are you? Six?” she asked.

If I had been a better kid, I would have demurred or at least promised to do extra chores. But I wasn’t that kind of daughter. I wanted -- deserved to be, I thought -- popular.

“Yes, size six,” I said.

I wore the shoes to school on Monday, and no one noticed. Soon, every dork like me had a pair. No one asked me to the dance. No one nominated me for student council. My life stayed exactly the same.

I didn’t ask my mother how she paid for the shoes until years later. I was in college then and had seen a boy wearing Docs. By then, the boots were woefully out of style. But I didn’t care about style anymore. I had given up on being cool (for the moment, anyway).

I called my mom after class. How had she paid for them? She hadn’t eaten lunch for three months. She had gone without a coat. She kept the money under her mattress.

She didn't remember that my life didn't change. She just remembered the day she bought them, how I put them on and walked around the neighborhood with a powder compact in my pocket, proud as all get out.

"You looked so happy," she said. "You looked beautiful."

Dissonance comes together

This month's very short essay prompt from the Sun Magazine is "singing." I honestly thought I had nothing to write about singing, but I'm trying to really force myself to write something on whatever prompt they have, so here we have my offering. I don't think I'll mail it to them, but you, lovely readers, can see:



On road trips, everyone in my family wanted control of the radio. My mother wanted to play the Bee Gees. My dad wanted to listen to sports. I usually had some new mixtape, a combination of pop and Christian songs taped off the radio. My brother ignored us. He had a Walkman and a Green Day tape. Problem solved.

The only song the four of us ever agreed on was The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming.” And the only reason we could agree on it is we all liked singing along. The boys sang lead; girls sang harmony. That was protocol, no fussing. (Believe me, I tried to sing lead once. My mother told me to hush.)

It was perfect except for one thing: None of us could sing. Oh, my parents believed otherwise. They both sang in the church choir, and my mother confidently sang praises to the Lord as she swept and mopped the kitchen. But I know better. I have heard our individual tones ringing through the house, and the sound is not good.

My brother accepted his deep-throated croak early on. “I sound horrible,” he whispered to me after an early-childhood attempt at Christmas carols. I learned the hard way, though. For years, my mother told me nothing was more beautiful than the sound of my voice, and I believed her enough to volunteer to sing The Little Mermaid theme song at a seventh grade talent show. It was not pretty.

Still, all our dissonance came together into something totally bearable (and on a family road trip, can you ask for anything better than bearable?) when “California Dreaming” came on. All was right with the world. That is, until we got to the line about the preacher (does he like to crow? does he like the cold?). None of us knew what he was saying, so we mumbled a bit, turning our faces toward our respective windows until the next verse.

Then, full-voiced, we joined back in: “He knows I’m gonna stay. (Knows I’m going to staaaaay).” If anyone could have heard us, they would not doubt we were a family.

Half-a-century of salt

Every month, The Sun Magazine does something called Readers Write. The magazine provides a prompt, and then readers submit a short little story based on that prompt. It has to be true. This month's prompt is "Making it Last," and I wrote this:

By all accounts, my Aunt Shirley's husband Jimmy was a handsome man - tall and half Czechoslovakian with a smile that usually could make women forget he'd done any wrong. He was also frugal, and he knew enough of the world to know a good deal didn't linger for long. So it was one day in 1970 when he ambled up to the grocery store in Krotz Springs, Louisiana, and saw that salt had gone on sale. Five cents a box - well that was too good to pass up. He spent that whole week's budget on salt. There must be years' worth here, my aunt thought as she helped unload the groceries. How does he expect me to make dinner for him and the three boys out of nothing but a bunch of salt?

For a while, the family thought they'd never run out. When the shaker emptied, Shirley would paw through the cupboard and produce another box. They carried it across state lines when they moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, then back to Louisiana. Then, when Shirley and Jimmy divorced a couple of years later - half on account of his stinginess, I should add - she somehow inherited the salt.

Shirley stayed single for a few years, but eventually she remarried a man from the local police force. George thought she was a little crazy when he first saw all the stored salt, but he grew to like not having to buy it. They had been married 24 years when George shook the last few crystals out of the salt shaker. Shirley hopped up to fetch another box. She looked in the cupboard then looked back at George, slightly dismayed.

"What is it?" George asked.

After 39 years, Shirley had run out of salt.