The Scrape of My Father's Slippers
I recently bought some clownishly large slippers online. They are extremely comfortable, like walking around with my feet encased in bubble gum.
I hate wearing shoes, or anything shoe-adjacent. I walk barefoot nearly all the time. When I must wear shoes, I’ll wear slippers if I can get away with it (e.g. the grocery store). If I can’t pull of slippers (e.g. the doctor), I’ll wear sandals. If I have to wear actual shoes (e.g. winter), I wear them without socks. It takes a great deal to get me into shoes and socks (e.g. a wedding). I hate having stuff on my feet, and I have ever since I was a little kid. At some point in my life, I could have probably trained my feet to tolerate shoes, if I’d ever settled into an ordinary 9-to-5 office job. Now, of course, it’s much too late, and I am happily stuck with this particular eccentricity.
Around the house, I’m nearly always barefoot, but I will make the occasional exception for winter temperatures. Thus, the slippers. Because I hate stuff on my feet, I bought extra furry slippers, one size too big.
They are ENORMOUS. And very comfortable.
Here’s the deal: they are so big that my feet drag on the floor. It’s that extra half inch of giant Clown Shoe slipper I’m unused to having on my feet. The bottom of the slippers often brush along the floor. It’s not annoying, the slippers are soft, the brushing is nearly silent. But the sound of the slippers kept reminding me of something that I couldn’t quite place.
I realized it had something to do with the rhythm of the brushing.
That detail led me to what was tickling at my memory: the scrape of my Dad’s slippers. Unlike me, he had no shoe-phobic tendencies, and so wore slippers around the house. We lived together for the last ten years of his life, and the last four years in close quarters, with both our rooms on the main floor of the house. We got to know the rhythms of each other’s lives in great detail. I listened to him walk around the house, first in slippers, and toward the end a walker, for hours, nearly every day.
The sound of my own slippers against the floor reminded me of the rhythm of my Dad’s slippers brushing against the floor. It’s a very specific sound, and it has a significant emotional component. Unlocking this sense memory also unlocked a sense of him walking next to me as my slippers scape the floor. This is not a new feeling.
There are two ways to interpret that sensation. The first: old age is catching up with me, and the rhythm of my Dad’s 80+ year old feet shuffling along the floor mirrors my own descent into, oh, let’s call it late middle age. I get that one sometimes, but not too often. I don’t feel too old, most days.
The second way my brain interprets that sensation is this: my Dad is beside me, helping me negotiate the twists and turns of my journey through this part of my life. He’s teaching me by example—the only way he really knew how to teach—how to grow older with patience and grace. He’s walking next to me. He’s still teaching me.
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I’ll throw in one more memory of my Dad here, because it’s been sitting in my head for years, unused. He used to enter the bathroom from the hallway, which was visible from my room. The bathroom was mostly white tile. A glass picture frame in the hallway was opposite the door. So, at night, when he flipped on the light switch in the bathroom, the light would reflect off the glass, and as he entered the bathroom it looked like he was walking into a field of pure white.
It reminded me of the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the old man in the empty white room after he pursues the monolith. Every time. My Dad walking into a room of white light and closing the door.
This isn’t a sad meditation on death or anything, nor was it in the movie. It’s just an image, one that has sat in my head for a few years now, and unlikely to find its way into a story. So I’ll leave it here, with little context, an no larger meaning, like a cool rock you find along the sidewalk during a walk. Tuck it in your pocket and take it home.
Peace.
