My Last Pair of Boat Shoes

I tend to track the fading away and retirement of various articles of my clothing, here on the blog, since, somehow, they always manage to breach the line of what is bloggable, in my universe. That, and I've pretty well managed to maintain a cartoon character's consistency of warddrobe for the last, say, 12 years, that calls for noting these passings as they happen. And this one, actually, is a pretty big one, to me.

I've been wearing (Dexter brand) boat shoes (aka docksiders, aka boat moccasins, aka loafers) as a primary foot covering since at least my junior year of high school, and probably earlier than that. This choice, like many aspects of my fashion, arose from my taking of a pair of such shoes from my father. At some point in High School, I even spray-painted an older pair of them gold, as an homage to that one fast runner guy that did the same thing in the olympics.

New pairs were always easy to come by, even after my feet got bigger than my dad's, thanks to a conveniently located (Dexter brand) shoe outlet store on the way to Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks that affored a Theodore Dreiserian luxury to my middle-class shoe affordings.

Other than a brief phasing-out of these shoes during my bad-back-having days scattered through my late teens, they remained a pretty consistent part of the ol' t-shirt & work pants warddrobe. But, at some point, the (Dexter brand) boat shoes stopped getting made, and the stores up in the A'dacks became generic shoe outlets. So I was left with a pair of what would be my last boat shoes. This being further complimented by certain life choices that have pushed my fairly strict vegetarianism into outright veganity this past year (so, like, no more leather shoes).

My Last Pair of Boat Shoes, as you can imagine, started to take a pretty severe beating, and were falling apart at the seams and wearing through at the soles. A last ditch effort was made in Georgia, before heading to Thailand, to get them repaired, which led to a semi-good-ol'-boy-network-facilitated caper to find a shoe repair guy that was up to the job and willing to do it fast. The outcome was maybe a little less than inspiring, but I at least managed to have some fresh traction-having-pieces installed to the soles:

Signs of repair/disrepair

But then came September (I'm drastically behind on blogging, I admit), and the tail-end of Thailand's rainy season. My Last Pair of Boat Shoes suffered a life-threatening injury, of some funky-ass mold growing up in them, after I unthinkingly left them sitting outside for a weekend. It doesn't take much, but behold the fatal blows they took:

Gross. Just gross.

Gross, up close.

So, there you have it. Until (if) I'm okay with buying new leather thing again, no more boat shoes. It's a bigger end of an era than any given t-shirt retirement, I think.