There were the hiking boots I've had since high school, so battered that one Sunday, near the Delaware Water Gap, the rubber sole started to crumble off in chunks. There were the short brown riding boots, perforated like brogues, that remained beloved even with a gash worn through the leather at the heel. There were the teal-blue pumps with a decorative buckle on the toe, made by an upscale French designer and borrowed, without total permission, from a friend's sister, for a twenty-first birthday party. Those came home flecked with my roommate’s vomit, a peel of leather dangling from the toe.
I brought each pair to my cobbler, a cheerful Italian who roots for the Rangers and likes to share pictures of his son, now in grade school. Not all of them could be salvaged (that shred of leather couldn’t be reaffixed) but, for the most part, he takes my shabby, downtrodden shoes and returns them intact, supple, sturdy. He found a patch of leather to bandage that hole and ordered new Vibram soles for my hiking boots. That was six years ago. I plan on taking them to Idaho this summer.
A shoe is your most basic vehicle, the means of transport for nearly every experience outside of your own home. My shoes had conveyed me through alpine meadows and canyons, carried me to job interviews and in pursuit of a new life abroad, or borne the abrasion of countless miles of New York City sidewalk. Reinvesting in a pair that has accompanied you so far already can feel redemptive, loyal to your inner self.
Not that your cobbler will always approve. He (in my experience thus far, my cobbler has always been a he) will turn your shoe over in his skilled hands, inspecting how far down you’ve allowed the heel to wear. He’ll gruffly twist the sole, as if to wring it out, to test its integrity. He’s apt to take a piece of chalk or a grease pencil to mark the balls and heels of each shoe, to transform it into a blueprint for reconstruction. You’ll strain not to snatch it back, to tell him to be gentle, to tell him not to pull back the sole, even if it is already coming apart. Some shoes he’ll pronounce too far gone. Or he’ll name a price startlingly close to the amount you paid for them to begin with. There is implicit criticism in his assessments, as if you have erred by thinking that you could wear these shoes (leather boots in the rain, wafer-thin sandals without a rubber sole, stilettos to a farmhouse wedding) without ruining them. But don’t see your cobbler as your adversary. He’s your trusty, if harsh, adviser. He can keep the appearance of penury at bay.
To spend time in a cobbler’s shop is to take a trip back in time. You can feel this in the wood-panelled wallpaper, in the aged flotsam strewn and piled about, and most of all in the notion that things of quality are meant to be fixed, repeatedly, even, rather than discarded and replaced. Cobblers replace buckles, stitch handbags, repair luggage, punch belt holes, sell umbrellas that last. Wherever you are in the world, at the cobbler you’ll find the clever, climate-appropriate artifacts of the local culture: roped espadrilles in Spain and Greece; in Stockholm, felt insoles that are the key to warm feet in the Northern European winter.
At the cobbler, as in a hoarder’s dream, it doesn’t pay to throw anything away. There are the destroyed shoes to be plundered for scraps; the as-yet unused, phlegm-colored rubber soles; greasy pots of polish; a sanding belt; pieces of leather and lengths of cord, shoelaces, and zippers, sundry bits and bobs. There’s a glass vitrine with brushes and daubers, conditioners and protectors, shoe trees and stretchers. There are brown-paper parcels of repaired shoes tied with string and handwritten paper tags that bear the essential details (deposit, phone number, balance due) in careful, curlicued script. And, amid the ordered chaos, there are the shoeshine chairs, the throne that any person, no matter how ordinary, can briefly mount (in public!) and imagine herself regal.
Taking a brand-new pair of shoes to the cobbler may seem high maintenance, like hand-washing lingerie or cleaning a coat before storing it come spring. But these days footwear is flimsy, with plastic parts, or fragile, with a thin, elegant sole, delicate stitching, and glossy leather that aren’t made to last. If you, like me, are going to wear these shoes everywhere and insist that they survive, you should strike up a lasting alliance with your neighborhood cobbler. Visit him early, to shore up against later damage. I learned this from my mother, who, when I was growing up, would insist on a small intervention to keep my new shoes intact: a trip to the shoemaker for taps, small kidneys of plastic, front and back, gently hammered with miniature nails. They cost three dollars and can save you dozens, and they tap a dainty rhythm when you walk—for me, that was the first echo of womanhood.
If you move to a new city, a shoemaker won’t be as pressing a need upon arriving as a grocery or drugstore, but if you plan to stay you’ll need to find one. I moved to a new city nine months ago, and last week I found mine. His name is Phillip, and he has been working in the same shop for fifty years. He wore an apron and a visor, and used an eyepiece for a closer look. Behind the counter he’s mounted a handwritten sign, partially obscured by an old cash register, stating that, as of 1991, all work must be paid for ahead of time, in full. Personal checks are accepted.
The first shoes I brought him were a new pair of babouches, a kind of flat leather mule, with a folded heel, that I had purchased on a trip to Morocco. They cost five dollars and were markedly similar to a slip-on that a hip Swedish brand sells for four hundred and seventy dollars. I was feeling smug about my thrift and sensible in my plan to reinforce them with rubber soles and taps—until Phillip turned them over in his hands. “You don’t intend to wear these outside, do you?”
