Suzanne McGillivray

Dorothy’s New Shoes

The time is 2008, a time of review, a time of assessment. I find myself travel through my house surveying the many objects I have collected over the years.

I see crystal and diamonds, gifts of antiquity and of technological worth. Things have come and gone, things have stayed, but what is their intrinsic worth. Objects are such transient things, not to be held onto, and does anything really belong to you anyway? What is the real value of things, of objects, of possessions.

And then… I wonder into my walk-in-robe and there my eye falls onto something so very precious, or rather not so much as an object but objects – my shoes!

To my surprise I found something precious. Many shoes of different shapes, colours, styles, high ones, flat ones, red ones, gold ones, black one, boots sandals, slippers; shoes for every occasion.

Where did this shoe thing of mine come from? Throughout my life I must have had hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of shoes?

I searched my mind and there lurking in the distant past is a young girl, face pressed up against the glass looking, wishing, hoping, pleading, for the most beautiful pair of shoes that ever walked the earth. They shined like diamonds, the colour of a warm magenta sunset and ever so gorgeous – a pair of patent leather, one inch heal, sling backs with a bow on the front.

But why this longing?

With that question out flowed the memory — each Saturday morning when my mother was doing the grocery shopping at the Nollamara shops I would stand at the shoe shop window and when she was done I would drag her and the trolley laden with the weeks groceries over to the window and show her the best shoes in the whole world.

And each Saturday she would tell me why I couldn’t have them —

“Too grown up for you”

“The heel’s too high”

“Too expensive”

“Too impractical”

Too, too, too!

“And anyway, they would be no good for your feet”

Flat as pancakes they were, not even room for a five cent piece to slip between the foot and the floor.

“But Muuuum, I’ve been doing my exercises” I would say.

But still no shoes.

Each night I had to pick up marbles between my toes, one at a time, all in the hope of one day developing arches. I didn’t think that arches really mattered and at 7 years old, I guess they don’t. But if doing those exercises were going to get me a pair of Dorothy shoes, I would keep on picking up those marbles.

One thing it did get me though was the ability to pinch my brother with my vice like grip. I think my toes must have been the strongest in all of Australia, or at least in Perth, for that was what Australia was to me at that time.

Then one day, a birthday or a Christmas, much to my surprise and delight — a box, with the shiniest magical pair of shoes a girl could ever want.

See, Dorothy was right! — If you wish hard enough, your dreams do come true!

I think the business of my shoes set me on a path of possibilities, it is one that I value above all other endeavours, my shoes are not the gift or of intrinsic value, but the journey of imagining and creating is.