Spit shine!

 

A couple of weeks ago, I actually had to get quasi-dressed up - for a lecture sponsored by an organization I'm involved with. 

I quit full-time corporate nearly 20 years ago, and that ended the days when I had to put on something decent (business casual at worst) and real shoes five days a week. But I still had occasions that called for something more formal than jeans and a turtleneck pretty regularly. 

I used to see my freelance clients in person - even the ones that aren't local - more regularly. So I'd wear a pants suit or nice separates.

I used to sit on a couple of boards, and you can't go to a board meeting looking like a bum.

I used to go out to dinner more and, not that I got all that dressed up, a lot of the time it was at least black pants and a nice sweater time.

I went to more "events". And "events" do mean donning something at least somewhat up to fashion totem pole from sweats.

Then, over time, life got more casual, and the occasions that required a bit of thought about clothing dwindled a bit. 

And then there was covid, and I certainly didn't need to dress up to hang around my house. 

During this long and winding period, the shoes I wore shifted from a variety of leather or suede shoes, boots, and sandals to sneakers, which I now wear 99.99% of the time. They're comfy. I walk a lot. And I don't get dressed up much. I actually have a reasonable hefty shoe budget, which mostly gets spent on the pricey sneakers I like (Asics). And that, walking 5-6 miles a day, I wear through.

Given all this, I rarely have to polish my shoes.

But I did for that recent lecture.

Originally, I was going to wear a dress to the lecture. I have an artsy little swing dress that I wear with leggings and a pair of cool-ish (by my standards, anyway) black leather shoes. But the dress needed ironing, and I wasn't up for it. So I went with Plan B. A nice pair of subtly plaid slacks paired with a decent sweater and scarf. (I am second only to the odious Dr. Deborah Birx when it comes to my affection for the wearing o' the scarf.)

The same shoes I was planning on wearing with the artsy little swing dress, as it happens, went just fine with the subtly plaid slacks.

All I had to do was polish them a bit.

Fortunately, thanks to my father, I do know how to polish shoes.

Saturday evening, Chez Rogers, was shoe polishing time. My father polished his work shoes (Florsheim wingtips), and the kids polished their school and Sunday shoes. My father used Kiwi cream polish, us kids used Esquire Scuff Kote, a liquid that came with an applicator lid that held a prong with a small sponge on its tip. For patent leather shoes, the girls used Vaseline. In the summer, if you wanted to polish your white sneakers or, later, in my case, needed to polish your waitress shoes, you used Sani-White, the brand with the nurse on the box.

My father had all the tools you needed to polish shoes, which he kept with his tins of Kiwi in a dopp kit. He had different sorts, consistencies and weights of rags, used for different purposes: applying polish vs. buffing; and a couple of different brushes. I can still picture him, left hand pushed into a Florsheim, as if it were a puppet, vigorously going at the shoe with a brush. People will judge you, he told us, and they'll judge you by the polish on your shoes. If your shoes are scuffed, they'll think you're a bum. 

No one was ever going to judge my father to be a bum (and, in truth, no one could have, even if his shoes hadn't been shined; he was the antithesis of a bum). He'd also been in the Navy, and he knew how to top things off with a spit shine. 

I carried Al's advice and training into my adult life, and when I worked, I had a full complement of polishes, rags, and brushes, which I kept in a macrame-style tote bag. Where they all still reside.

It's been a while since I've been into that bag. Over the last few years, whatever shoe polishing I've done was with the lick-and-a-promise neutral applicator sponges that are sometimes included in hotel vanity kits. That or a roll-on bottle of black polish (Kiwi), which was also a lick-and-a-promise item. 

Anyway, I decided to give the black shoes I was going to wear a real polishing, and sorting through the polishes I had in there, looking for the tin of black, was a stroll down business fashion memory lane. 

Cordovan! Cordovan? Did I use that on my Etienne Aigner boots or pumps? Probably not. Too much brown in cordovan. For the Aigners I likely used Meltonian Burgundy Shoe Cream. I also had Meltonian Navy Shoe Cream, which I used on my Johnson and Murphy navy heels, and on the far comfier Naturalizer navy low heels and the Munro navy loafers.

Neutral Kiwi I don't remember using on shoes. I had so many different colors of polish, I never had to resort to neutral. But Neutral Kiwi serves one purpose, at which it excels: it can be used to remove Kiwi Cordovan or Kiwi Black from your

fingertips, if you're rubbing so intently that the polish comes through.

Amazingly, none of my various polishes had completely dried up. Some of them must be 40 years old. Amazing!

I also had a number of different rags in my shoeshine bag. Some were "real" shoeshine rags, others were rags sliced out of old flannel nightgowns, old soft cotton tee-shirts.

When I polished my black shoes for the lecture, I was nowhere near as meticulous as my father would have been. But I did give those shoes a bit of a spit shine. He would have been proud...