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Show dressed identically in denim and white t-shirts, squinting into the sun. My guess is that any day of the year, at least during the warmer seasons, would find them wearing the same clothes, hair askew in the same way, straps falling off their shoulders, maybe a few inches taller. One year my father asked for new boots, a pair he had seen in the Sears catalog, a thick book worn soft from repeated handling, one of the only books in the house. His mother ordered them for him, and he waited weeks for them to arrive. Shiny and black. When they came, they were too small. Crestfallen, my father tried to jam his feet into the boots. We have to send them back, his mother said. But my father insisted they fit, could not imagine waiting several more weeks for a new pair to arrive. She gave in-there wasn't time in her day to argue with an eight-year-old about proper footwear. His uncle convinced him to cut holes in the tops of the foot boxes, allowing his toes some room to spring. With sadness, he cut into the lovely black leather, the skin giving way like butter, ruining the shoes and barely increasing the comfort. That year he walked to school in boots with holes that let in the snow and rain. A lesson learned, I suppose. Natural consequences is what it might called today in the parenting books. But he was eight, with little that was shiny and new in his life, little not handed down from his older brothers. And he had to destroy something that he loved, an act he will be forced to repeat again and again, an act that will shape his future relationships to the land, to animals, to his own children. When my father tells stories from his childhood, sorrow is not the line he follows. Proud of the fact that on his tenth |