I Wore Two Different Shoes to the Board Meeting
Nobody mentioned it, which somehow made everything worse.
I found out in the elevator, on the twenty-first floor of a glass building, thirty seconds before the most important meeting of my year. The doors are mirrored, and the mirror showed a man in a good suit, a fresh haircut, and one black oxford and one brown brogue.
Not similar shoes. Not a forgivable, squint-and-you-miss-it pairing. A black lace-up with a square toe and a brown slip-on with stitching like a picnic basket. My feet looked like two strangers forced to share a taxi.
There was no time to do anything about it. The doors opened directly onto the boardroom floor, and Kavita from the chairman's office was already walking toward me saying they had started early, and I had forty slides on quarterly logistics margins under my arm, and so I did the only thing available to a man in my position. I walked in as if I had planned it.
Here is what I need you to understand about that meeting: it was ninety minutes long, I presented standing up for forty of those minutes, I walked to the screen and back six times, I crossed and uncrossed my legs at a table with a glass top, and not one of the eleven people in that room said a single word about my shoes.
Not a glance I could catch... Not a smirk. Not even the chairman, who once stopped a meeting to point out that a director's phone case did not match his tie, an observation he delivered as though it were a finding of the audit committee.
Nothing.
For the first twenty minutes I was grateful. By minute forty, standing at the screen while the numbers glowed behind me, gratitude had curdled into something stranger. By the end, walking out with handshakes and a "strong quarter" and a pat on the shoulder, I felt like a man who had attended his own meeting as a hologram.
Because there are only two explanations, and both kept me up that night. Either everyone saw and was too polite or too indifferent to say so. Or nobody saw... Nobody, in ninety minutes, actually looked at me. Eleven pairs of trained, detail-hunting eyes, people who catch a decimal error on slide thirty-one from across the room, and not one of them looked at the actual human standing in front of them long enough to notice he was wearing two different shoes.
I could not decide which was worse. I still cannot.
Now for the part I did not tell anyone at the office, which is the reason there were two different shoes in the first place.
My father was diagnosed the year before. The doctors used gentle, latinate words for it, but what it means is that his memory is a coastline and the sea is patient.
He still lives in the flat I grew up in, and by that spring I was sleeping there three nights a week, in my old room with the cricket posters gone but their tape marks still on the wall. On those mornings I dressed in the dark, because if the light woke him before his nurse arrived, he would sometimes come into the room confused about what decade we were in, and there is no meeting on this earth that justifies starting his day with fear.
So my work shoes lived in a row by his front door, next to his, and on the morning of the board meeting I reached into the dark and took one of mine and, apparently, one of the pairs from some other era of my life, and I carried my laptop bag past his bedroom on socked feet like a burglar of my own childhood, and I put on the mismatched evidence in the corridor outside, in a hurry, looking at my phone.
That is the whole mystery... Nothing profound. Just a man doing two lives on four hours of sleep, and the seams showing.
The office saw the seams and said nothing... Or saw nothing.
But this story is not really about the meeting. It is about six o'clock that evening.
I went back to my father's flat straight from work, still in the shoes, because after the meeting it had become a bit with myself, a penance, a dare.
My father was in his chair by the balcony with his tea, looking out at the towers across the road where there used to be a cinema, and the lights of the city were starting to come on the way they do, one window at a time, like the buildings remembering themselves.
That week had been a hard one for him. On Monday he had asked me how my mother was, and she has been gone nine years. On Wednesday he introduced me to the nurse as his brother. The doctors tell you not to correct them too sharply. You learn to live one conversation at a time, in whatever year the conversation is happening.
I bent down to touch his feet the way he still expects, and he looked at me, and his eyes went down, and he said, with the crisp, amused authority of the man who taught me to polish shoes on Sunday nights forty years ago:
"You're wearing two different shoes, beta."
Four seconds. It took him four seconds.
A room full of people who forget nothing noticed nothing. A man who forgets almost everything looked at me once and saw.
I sat down on the floor next to his chair and laughed until the laugh changed into the other thing, and he patted my head with his tea-warm hand, unbothered, because in whatever year he was in, a son crying at his feet was apparently not remarkable, just weather.
He told me to take the shoes off. He told me, and I will keep this sentence for the rest of my life, "Dress in the light. Whatever it costs you."
He forgot the conversation by dinner. I know because he pointed at the shoes by the door an hour later and laughed like he was seeing them for the first time, which he was.
I have thought about that day more than any deal I have ever closed. At work I am legible: a title, a slide deck, a strong quarter. Eleven people can attend that version of me for ninety minutes without once needing to look at it. My father has lost my job title entirely. Some days he loses my name. What is left when all of that is gone is apparently the part that actually looks, the Sunday-night shoe-polish part, the part that checks whether the boy is put together before he goes out into the world.
Memory is not where love lives.
I have watched the house burn down and the love just stand there, unhoused and undiminished.
I did not know what to do with any of this, so at forty-six I did something I had not done since school: I started writing it down. Clumsily at first, then with help, because it turns out you can still learn to write at my age the way you learn anything, badly in front of strangers. Most of what I write circles memory, what it keeps and what it drops and why it drops the meetings first and the shoe polish last. The rest circles family, which I used to think was a duty roster and now understand is the only audience that ever really watches.
The shoes are still at his flat, by the door. Both pairs, all four shoes, reunited. I never fixed the row; I like the reminder.
And some nights, after he sleeps, I stand on his balcony with the city glittering out to the horizon, a thousand lit windows full of people presenting slides to each other, and I think: all those rooms, all that attention, and the best pair of eyes I know is dimming in a chair behind me, still capable, on the right evening, of seeing me in four seconds flat.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.