The mystery shoes were really nice shoes.
The other day I drove by the hotel where my mom and dad stayed years ago for my niece’s wedding. My gentle and loving father was showing the first severe signs of Alzheimer’s, and this was the last trip they took before he was no longer able to travel.
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They’d booked a room at the local Marriott Courtyard. It was a lovely wedding until Dad decided to light his pipe in the church. I thought Mom might have a heart attack right there. With an audible smack on his thigh, she stage-hissed, “Jesus Christ John, put that damn thing out!” I began to snort, strangle, laugh uncontrollably. The priest, Father L, gave us “the look” but by then we were all smiling sweetly back at him. Going to hell, all of us.
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Everything else went off without a hitch. That is until Mom called me when they got home the next day. It seems Dad was complaining that his shoes were too tight, and his feet hurt. Once she looked at his shoes, she realized something was terribly wrong.
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His shoes were brown, and Dad didn’t have any brown shoes. “John,” she asked, “where did you get these shoes?” Poor Dad didn’t know. Clearly, they weren’t his shoes. They were a size too small as well as being brown. And his black shoes were missing.
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Mom called me with the big mystery, and we could only come up with one thing: Dad had exchanged his black shoes at the hotel for someone’s brown shoes. We laughed ourselves sick.
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How did Dad get the brown shoes? Did some unsuspecting European gentleman put his shoes outside the door to be polished and Dad helped himself? Did Dad go into someone else’s room? Mom called the hotel, but no one had reported missing any brown shoes or a mysterious appearance of a pair of black shoes in their luggage.
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Dad was much happier with his new black shoes purchased to replaced the swanky brown ones. The brown shoes went to the thrift store where I bet someone couldn’t believe their good fortune. We never found the answer to this shoe mystery. But I bet some other family has a story about how their dad’s brown shoes turned black and grew larger one weekend.
Why would a life coach publish these stories on her blog? I believe we need to understand that life has so many doors to choose from that we don’t need to limit ourselves to a narrow path of experiences. Even when bad things happen to us, we can learn and move on from them. We decide not to let the past limit or color our future and our happiness. We can throw the “shoulds” out the window and create where we want to go and how we want to get there. We can reinvent ourselves whenever we want.
And that’s where I come in as a coach. You can find out more about working with me by clicking here Work with me
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