SHOE THERAPYby Claude T. Hector I immigrated to the United States when I was child and I often
SHOE THERAPYby Claude T. Hector I immigrated to the United States when I was child and I often wonder how I would’ve turned out if I’d have been raised in my native Haiti. Mostly, I wonder if I would’ve suffered from the anxiety and depression that has been with me for the past decade. But we can experiment with alternate realities only in our imaginations. In the reality we have, we can only experiment with coping mechanisms. An important one for me has been finding routines that create an order to my life and keep me well grounded, connected to what I know. One of those routines is shining my shoes.Upon immigrating to the States, my mother and I found ourselves living with my uncle on Long Island. My father wasn’t in my life meant, so I was always searching for a male role model and my uncle became the first of these surrogate fathers for me. To this day I mimic many of his behaviors and one of my favorites was the way he prepared his clothing the night before work. How he carefully pressed his shirts and lovingly ironed the crease into his pants. Most of all I loved watching him shine his shoes. Every night, he’d take a brush to his shoes and once he buffed out all the dirt, he’d apply multiple layers of shoe shine until his shoes gleamed. I thought it was the coolest thing my seven year old self had ever seen. He took notice that I was enthralled with the process and one day he sat me down in his lap and showed me how to buff his shoes and how to apply the shine just like him and from that day on it became our thing. To my memory, it was the first time a man had ever taught me how to do a “manly” thing. These days, it may be all I can do to get out of bed to shower and make it back to bed again. When I feel myself getting to that point, I keep in my mind that the way I present myself to the world is one of the few things I can control. That’s when I take out my own shoe care kit and start to methodically brush a pair of shoes. I then carefully apply the shoe polish, seeing myself more and more clearly in the shine of the leather, and in that moment I’m seven again and I’m sharing a moment with the only father I’ve ever known. -- source link
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