Around 3 decades ago I went to Tijuana and had a learning experience that’s lasted a lifetime. This happened in Mexico but it could have been anywhere because what I did was buy boots; cowboy boots; snakeskin cowboy boots with silver toe & heel tips. It’s not that I didn’t like the boots, I liked them very much, it’s that the smallest I can fit my big feet into is a 10-1/2 but the largest this Tijuana boot vendor had was a 10. “They’ll stretch,” he assured me, and those pointy tips & Python scales were calling out to me, so I succumbed to the overwhelming temptation and chose to believe that lying dog. That was the learning experience: a good salesman will say anything to get the sale, so caveat emptor. (Let the buyer beware.) Now I never trust salesmen.
Though those boots squeeze my feet to this day, I’ve worn them 1000s of times. All the things I imagined they’d be met my expectations: style, an extra 2” of height, swooning women (my wife anyway); just not comfort. The silver tips were particularly cathartic because they signaled I was just an urban Cowboy, I was a rodeo watching, bolo tie, hat & belt buckle wearing real man. Minus the heel tips, those fell off within a couple years. The toe tips had a few close calls; I found them dangling by one nail a number of times; those nails simply wear down but I always caught it just in time… Until now. Sad to say, while wearing my boots to go with my Woody (from “Toy Story”) Halloween costume to accompany my granddaughter trick-or-treating, I looked down and one of the tips was missing.
I was devastated; after all these years. I did check in the car, and under the table at Burger King, even out in the parking lot where someone had thrown up, but to no avail, it was gone. Probably some icky little kid dressed up like a Storm Trooper had found it & thrown it in his plastic pumpkin along with the rest of the goodies he’d collected. I told my wife, Gwynne, “At least it was there for the book cover photo shoot we took last week of me dressed up in cowboy regalia except wearing a swimsuit in the surf at the beach.” Gwynne was sad too; she always thought my boot tips were sexy; hell, we got 3 kids out of the deal. That’s why she was so excited when she called me after taking out the trash. I ran in to see what was happening and she held up the lost tip, a little worse for wear from getting run over by a car, but repairable as always. Now we can get working on a 4th kid.
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