Only a Female

Dear friends,

 

For your enjoyment, the beginning half of a post I began in early September.

 This past week has been mildy engrossing. Since Wednesday, I have not slept a single night; between babies and scrabbling, genius is burned [out]. Jo in her scribble-suit, apples and inkwell in hand, could and would do a hundred times better - as for me, my pen has been replaced with blue nitrile exam gloves, lancets, and a pediatric stethascope. I write, but very little of it is creative. Letters are left without replies (though this cannot be excused on the basis of little sleep and no time: I have been in the habit of year-long silences since my days as a six-year-old cousin correspondent). My fondly-cherished writing projects are incomplete and untouched. I console myself with E. B. White's assertation that the best writer is the writer who has lived at least forty years of his life, and go on shamelessly neglecting my stories; leaving behind beloved characters and spending my inspiration in catching slippery little fish-babies, teaching laboring mothers to dance, and reviewing the endless steps of neona  tal resuscitation. I used to read novels to unwind. Now I spend my spare time after work playing with a model pelvis and a baby doll, Anne Frye opened on my lap to page three-hundred-and-fifty-seven, teaching myself the maneuvers to extract a breech baby who has gotten herself stuck. Life is interesting.

 

 Given the fact that I must be at clinic by seven-thirty tomorrow morning, and given that it is almost midnight, I should be in bed. Instead, I shall go get a bowl of shredded wheat and continue on with this blog post.

 

 

Yes, I continued writing. No, you are not going to see what I wrote - it testifies only that my ability to reason left me once I reached the kitchen.

 

Moving on to other things...

 

This will, I expect, be the first and the last you shall ever read from me on the subject of shoes. I don't consider myself especially girly - I'll take black over pink any day, and prefer leather boots and denim jackets to frilly blouses. I never believed I would be so ridiculous as to find excitement in a pair of shoes.

 

Unfortunately, I discovered that I do indeed have a girly side. It happened when I paced up and down the aisle in GoodWill, hunting for a decent pair of shoes to wear to work now that fall is arriving and sandals are no longer suitable. (I usually possess two pairs of shoes at any given time of the year. One pair is for sloshing about in mud puddles or snowy ditches, and the other is for everything else.) Since my feet are a bit on the larger side, and since I am rather particular about a certain 'look' for my footwear, I was getting frustrated with the selection. At some point I found myself staring at a fanciful pair of heels, impractical, blue, covered with little flowers. I tried them on for a laugh and promptly fell over.

 

For your information, I have one pair of high-heeled shoes. It is the only pair of heels I have ever owned to date, and I bought it three weeks ago because I simply couldn't find anything else within my price range for wearing to my cousin's wedding. I absolutely refused to go wearing scuffed black clogs. I've used a permanent marker on scuffs before, but there's only so many times that it works, and it is not the sort of thing one does for weddings. Especially not weddings of cousins.

 

Anyway. I continued shoe shopping. I tried on a few respectable pairs, steered safely clear of the horrid 'granny' shoes, and acquired one pair of indigos. Then I went back to the other rack and picked up those blue shoes. They were just too ridiculously cute. I looked at them a bit, set them down, and stalked away to the dress section. (GoodWill's dress rack holds either tent-like pieces that once belonged to two-hundred-and-fifty-pound matrons, or slinky little dresses that could only have come out of the closet of a eighty-three-pound anorexic. I am neither.) After an exasperating browse, I returned to the the shoes. "For a laugh," I told Mum, mostly as an excuse for buying them. "I'll show them to the girls." Sheepishly, I carried them to the checkout and paid for them.

 

Once safely home, I flew to the basement and dumped my bags on the floor, then reached for the blue heels. I slipped them onto my feet and danced - /danced/ - around the great sewing room. I strutted, clicked my heels together, and piroetted. And I didn't fall over once. I didn't even wobble.
 

A pair of shoes has never made me so happy. I expect no pair ever will.

 

 

 

 

 

Not bad for three ninety-seven, ne? And this is the girl who said just the other day that heels are only a game of seeing how long a lady can avoid breaking her ankle.