Reading: Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Moving: walked 2.7 miles + weights

Watching: mapgies building sloppy nests

Listening: Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (tape 2.5)

6 April 2001: Trotter

I love me. I do. I have my flaws, but overall, I think I'm keen.

When I was a child, my sister and I each had two pair of shoes: one pair for Sundays and dress-up and another for everyday including most school days. My sister desperately craved black patent leather Mary Janes, which never appeared. I don't know how I started hating shoes. Perhaps because I always loved being barefoot. Perhaps because I could never find the one pair that would go with everything as my budget required. Between hating shoes and not having a lot of money, I was pretty well into having one pair of shoes to the point that, one time freshling year, PLT asked me, pointing, if those were my only shoes. (I was wearing Sperry Topsiders, which I wore with jeans and shorts and sweats and the wool trousers I found for a steal at T.J. Maxx and the big pleated skirt for my 12th grade class dinner.) No, they weren't. I also had sandals for summer and Tretorns. (I didn't convert to Bean Bluchers until sophomore year, since which I've never looked back.) Maybe some others.

So I've never liked shoes, which makes shopping for shoes difficult. I don't enjoy it, as I do shopping for dresses, and I hate almost everything, so I don't have many pairs, even now after having been full grown for 12 or more years to accumulate pairs. Bluchers, still and always. The knee-length boots my sister gave me for Christmas years ago and which, this year, I replaced. A pair of conservative black leather pumps with a square-cut vamp, which I highly prefer to the pointier-heeled and toe-cleavage-exposing vamp black pumps I wore for dress-up (interviews and evening) before. These pumps I can wear every day to work, instead of the older pumps and a succession of black flats (nearly loafers) that I also never liked. Hiking boots. Those damn grey-silver satin pumps I spent weeks finding last fall for weddings and my lavender suit. Black leather sandals, which I also never liked but which I wanted for those few occasions I wear black in the summer. And brown leather sandals, flat of course, that I wear to work almost every day all summer long.

This year I took the radical step of not pursuing a new pair of brown leather sandals. When flipping through a Nordstrom catalog (I get these now after buying the boots from them), I saw a pair of slides. And I ordered them. Today they arrived at work. I scampered into the office of someone who's out for the week, removed my pumps and thigh-highs and tried them on. They don't show toe cleavage and they stay on my feet. The uppers are "natural" colored "microfiber," whatever that is, and the soles are rubber. The only leather bit is the footbed. And I like them.

I like shoes? And I still like me? What's going on here?

The shoes have the embarrassing brand name of "Trotter." The style is "Lola." But--harkening to that first sentence a few paragraphs back--the reason I like myself is what happened to me when I read "Trotter." First I thought of Harriet the spy, but although she called her nurse by her last name--didn't she?--that last name wasn't Trotter. The next book was The Great Gilly Hopkins. Of course. Gilly's foster mother is Mame Trotter. I love Gilly. I don't know whether I read this or Bridge to Terabithia first. But I do love Gilly, and for the rest of the day I lived in scenes from the book. The book of poetry. The poem she wrote for her teacher and the books her teacher gave her. The little foster brother. Visiting her mother. Wow.