Update: Thank you so much, everyone, for your kind comments. My Mom read them too, and was very touched and thankful. She is working on two books about her WWII experience, and seeing that people enjoyed reading a story about her, will give her writing another shot of momentum. Thanks again.
After reading enamore22's recommended diary "Obama Resoles His Shoes While Palin Spends $150K", I immediately sent the link to my 76-year-old Mom. She and my Dad live in the great swing-state of Montana and are already big Obama supporters. But I knew she would love the "Obama shoe story" because of what it says about the Senator: "In a world where so many do without, don't use up more than you need."
Follow me over the fold to find out how the lack of shoes as a child, was one of the experiences from which my Mom learned this important principle...
It's a principle my Mom has lived by all her life, sometimes to the chagrin and embarrassment of her children. For example when I was a kid I remember carrying my lunch to school for several months, in a wooden case that used to hold my mother’s paints and art supplies. It was mortifying to sit at the lunch table, eating out of my paint-spattered wooden box, while all the other kids had those tin lunch boxes with cartoon characters on them. But as new immigrants who came to America with little more than my father’s student loan debt and some furniture handed down from their parents, my Mom and Dad didn’t have much. And in my Mom’s view, there was no need for a new lunch box when the wooden case could hold my lunch just as well.
My Mom’s frugality, however, really stems from her own childhood. She was born in Germany in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power. She was six when World War II began on the continent, and remembers well the bombings, fleeing into the forest when the front came too close, the stories of friends and neighbors going away to fight or being "taken away", often never to be seen again.
But she also remembers the years of just not having enough of anything, whether it was food, soap, clothing, or coal. The ration cards only went so far, and often the stores were just empty. Or, they had been bombed into rubble.
And if you were lucky enough to have shoes, you wouldn’t dream of throwing them away just because they had a few holes. You’d repair them as best you could, because new shoes were just nowhere to be had. Children’s shoes, once hopelessly outgrown, could be given to a neighbor, perhaps in exchange for some eggs, or a slab of bacon fat, or a loaf of bread.
That first winter after she outgrew her shoes, my Mom remembers shuffling to school wearing her father’s shoes. She stuffed an extra pair of socks into the large gap at the heel, and felt like a circus clown. But she was far from alone; lots of kids hobbled around on oversized feet during those times. At least during the warmer months they could wear the crude sandals fashioned (so to speak) from tire treads, often salvaged from the hulks of burned-out trucks abandoned on the side of the road.
Many decades have passed since my Mom last had to wear tire tread sandals, although the sandals she was wearing when I visited last summer, didn’t look much better. Through hard work and some wise investments, my parents today are blessed with enough to live very comfortably, but the lessons learned in those days of hardship are with my mother to this day. While my Dad loves to go to CostCo to stock up and acquire the latest gadget, my Mom would just as soon make do with what she already has. When he teases her about never wanting to spend any money, she answers "But I don’t need anything!"
But last summer, when she came with me to the shoe store where I planned to buy some walking shoes for our trip to Glacier National Park, I happened to glance down at her feet and was horrified. The soles on her thoroughly beaten-up sandals were so worn down, I didn’t want to think about the stress they were putting on her already-troubled and painful knees. "Mom, why don’t you get some new sandals?" I said, guiding her to the display of walking shoes with the comfortable-looking anatomical footbeds. "Oh, these are still good" she answered. "Those are so expensive."
"Just try some on. You don’t have to buy them," I replied, knowing it would do absolutely no good to point out that the sandals on her feet were about to fall apart. Thankfully, the new shoes were so much more comfortable to walk in, she decided this extravagant purchase was justified after all.
At the counter ready to pay for our shoes, my Mom reached into her handbag...which isn’t a handbag at all. Her "everyday handbag" is a green vinyl tote bag that she has had for several years now. She got it for free as part of a promotion at her favorite department store cosmetic counter, which is about one of the only things she splurges on. But even now, after the mini facial soap, lipstick sample, and travel-sized mascara that came packed inside the promo bag have long since been used up, she still carries that green tote everywhere she goes.
And for the last several months, the green vinyl freebie bag has had her "Obama ‘08" button pinned to the handle. And when she called me just now, having read the "Obama shoe story" that I emailed her, she said "Obama and I, we have a lot in common."
My Mom in Ennis, Montana last summer, with her ever-present green vinyl freebie bag (and well-worn shoes).