Stepping up to find son’s shoes
Two things prompted this column today. I heard “Driving Home for Christmas” playing on the radio and I saw a shoe on the road. The song first. “Driving Home for Christmas” is my favourite song at this time of year. I usually find an excuse to write a column when I hear it. One time I told you about a pally who hockey-taped a flashlight to the front of his car after he crashed into a light standard on Christmas Eve and smashed his left headlamp to smithereens.
“I do not want to be stopped by the cops for not having two lights on the front of my car,” he said with a straight face. Then we drove home to Niagara Falls, fingers crossed.
OK, about the shoe. In my case, it was shoes. Plural.
My latest son just turned 19 and is independent and self-sufficient. When he was 4, he wasn’t.
That year, just before Christmas, I went to pick him up at Montessori. (He nearly gave the teacher there a nervous breakdown when he was 3. My wife was embarrassed; I was thrilled he was a chip off the old block.) When you are 4, you have baggage (as distinct from the baggage we all have later in life). There is usually lots of it and your dad has to carry it and sometimes you, too.
So we collected his drawings (which couldn’t go in his backpack because they would be damaged), and the backpack, and his lunch box and whatever. We took off his shoes and put on his overshoes, got him into his snowsuit (I am doing most of this, by the way) and got loaded up and ready to go (he insisted on being carried). Then I saw his shoes were still on the floor and I said drat (or something similar).
So I put him down, and everything else too, and tried to figure out where to put his shoes so I wouldn’t have to come back in and get them later. I wound up tying the laces together like we did with hockey skates and I put them over my shoulder and loaded everything up again and away we went.
We got to the car and so as not to lose track of anything (remember I said that), I put him down and put the shoes on top of the car until everything else (including him) was inside. In retrospect, I think it was while I was strapping him into his car seat that I forgot about the shoes. In any event, away we went, heading for our apartment in East York.
As I am passing Woodbine Ave. while driving north on O’Connor Dr., I hear “ker-clunk-ker-clunk” at the back of the car and I look in my rearview and see that my 4-year-old son’s shoes have fallen off the car and ended up smackdab in the middle of the intersection.
I turn around and go back to park in the Shoppers Drug Mart lot at that corner. I park the car so that my kid can see me as I scramble out there to get his shoes, which I do successfully.
I get back in the car and I turn to hand over his shoes to him, boasting out loud about how quickly I was able to run into the middle of the road, all the while dodging cars and TTC buses and all matter of other vehicles in order to rescue his shoes, and he says: “That was pretty stoo-pid, daddy. Please don’t do that again.”
Which I didn’t — until two weeks later. But this time his shoes fell off the car on Bayview Ave. near Moore and were much, much easier to retrieve.
But that’s another story. Maybe even another column. nmcdonald@thestar.ca