Remembering When - March 24, 2010

By Lola Russell

When I was newlywed, I tried to be very efficient and make myself useful as I was going to be a stay-at-home mom for the first time in my life. In my first marriage, I worked several jobs and only resigned when I left Alexandria to live in Shreveport.

I began to rearrange things to my liking. On our first shopping trip together, John purchased a pair of dress shoes. He informed me that he would take them to a shoe shop and have a lift added to the heel of the shoe that he wore on the leg which was slightly shorter than the other, due to childhood polio.

On Monday morning, I decided to be a dutiful housewife and take the shoe to be fixed and save him the trouble. He told me that he had it only raised from 1/4 of an inch tapering to 1/8 of an inch. I figured he would be proud of me for taking the time to do it for him.

When he got home from work, I brought the shoes to him and had him try them on and stand up. Problem!!! I took the wrong shoe. He was leaning over-sort of like those pictures we had taken at the crooked house supposedly built by a drunk man on one of our Tennessee vacations.

The next day, I went back to the shoe shop with both shoes and told the man what I had done. He tried to hide a grin and said he would take care of it for me and I could pick them up the next day.

He was very nice. He gave me a discount.

Everyone kidded me about that for a little while until something else came up that was just as stupid.

Remembering some of the amusing things that happened makes me a little less sad.