The Shoe Salesman
Ray and I were in Chattanooga recently for our last homeschool conference of the 2017 season. I loved meeting several of you there. On Friday night, we took advantage of being in the “big city” and shopped for shoes for Ray.
The small, elderly man who waited on us seemed at first to be much too old to be working the late shift at a mall department store on a Friday night. As I watched him behind the counter, I tried to figure him out. I tried to imagine why he was working as a salesman in a shoe department at his age. Was he poor? Did he not have enough money to live on without supplementing his income with this job?
The longer we interacted with this bright, cheerful, and intelligent man, the more fascinating he became. He was definitely much more knowledgeable than the average salesman I encounter in a department store shoe department. In between his explanations to us about the benefits of the brand Ray was considering and his trips to the backroom to bring out boxes of shoes in Ray’s size, he told us bits and pieces about his life.
No wonder our salesman knew what he was talking about. He began selling shoes in 1957 — sixty years ago — while he was a teenager in north Georgia. Here’s the men’s shoe department at a Miami, Florida, department store that same year.
Once a shoe company offered to transfer our salesman to Pennsylvania. He told them that while he was stationed up north during his army days, he had experienced eight feet of snow before Thanksgiving. He wanted no part of it. He told us that he likes snow to be of the north Georgia variety — this much (he held his fingers about an inch and a half apart) and it melts by morning.
Our shoe salesmen went on to tell us that he eventually moved to Chattanooga and that his daughter went to college there and that she had married and now he has a grandchild. I didn’t say anything, but was surprised that this man who looked like a great-grandfather was just having his first grandchild.
I didn’t have to wonder long, because he quickly explained, “I didn’t get married until I was 44. I took care of my granny. She took care of me while I was coming up, and I took care of her.”
He went on to explain that one day he went home from work and “they” told him that she had said she was going home (I’m not sure who “they” were; I assume perhaps hospice or some other caregivers) . Our shoe salesmen went in to see his granny, and thirty minutes later she died. “You know, she was going to that mansion,” he told us.
I wish I could remember the exact statement this gentleman said about the completion of his care for his granny, but his meaning came across to me something like this: I made it. It meant so much to me to carry that job all the way through to the end and I did it!
I think our shoe salesman sells shoes because he loves to sell shoes, and because he loves to talk to people. Think about how many people he has met in a career going back to 1957. What a blessing he must have been and must continue to be to so many people.
Our shoe salesman took care of his granny one day at a time. She took care of him the same way — one day at a time. Hang in there as you nurture your family and homeschool and do all those other things you do. If you simply do that one day at a time, you, too, can carry the jobs God has for you to do all the way to the end.
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous;
love does not brag and is not arrogant,
does not act unbecomingly;
it does not seek its own, is not provoked,
does not take into account a wrong suffered,
does not rejoice in unrighteousness,
but rejoices with the truth;
bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7