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| I Believe Similar Conditions Could Be Caused by a Precipitation of Fashionable Women's Shoes |
I had told her I expected to be wrapped up with the orphans by eleven-thirty, but she was confident it would take at least forty-five minutes. So she drove off and left me.
As I watched her tail lights disappear, I silently prayed, "Please don't let there be shoes."
Forgive me if the rest of this blog seems sexist, but in the spirit of honesty I must tell you my wife - like many other women, so I've been told - loses all sense of time when in the presence of shoes. I have seen her walk through a department store at a reasonable clip and then passing by a display of shoes be sucked in like a hapless spaceship into a Black Hole. For this very reason, I no longer go to department stores with her, or if I absolutely must, it will be after a promise we will not go near the shoe department. I have seen my own despair reflected in the haunted eyes of my fellow men who have gone to the store only to have a one-hour shopping trip drag on into an entire afternoon because of their wives' helpless fascination with shoes. Again, if this sounds sexist, so be it.
Atlanta is just now recovering from a snow storm which iced over the highways to such an extent, 85 was at an absolute standstill, and many motorists spent the entire night in their cars. I believe similar conditions could be created if a sufficient number of fashionable women's shoes were to precipitate over the city.
To give just one perfectly factual example, my wife patronizes a shoe store, the name of which eludes me, where they give her a little punch-card. You know the sort of thing I mean, like at a sandwich shop, where they punch a card every time you get a sandwich, and then the tenth sandwich is free. Think of the weirdness of this. Reasonably, having eaten a sandwich on Monday, you might need another on Tuesday, but having bought one pair of shoes, how soon could you expect to need another, short of climbing the Himalayas or growing an extra pair of feet? And by the time you'd worn out enough shoes to fill an entire punch-card , surely all the ice caps would have melted and the mountains sunken into plains. And yet Nancy has redeemed her punch-card several times.
The mind reels.
Well, you'll be glad to know, Nancy was not late picking me up; she was there to pick me up at exactly a quarter 'til. As a matter of fact, I was the one who kept her waiting.
But we're not talking about me. We're talking about her.
