Now that we’re all coming out from our pandemic bunkers and joining up with the others, who, like us, find themselves blinking at the sunlight outside the cave, there are neglected tasks that need attending to. There are dusty suits that need a good brushing; there are belts that need an extra hole to accommodate waistlines that have expanded with Zoom-induced lethargy; and there are shoes that need shining.
That’s right, it’s time to buff up the brogues that have suffered in silence for the last couple of years. If you are wearing a suit, please no more tennis shoes. And if you are going to be wearing real shoes, please no more scuffed uppers that look like they’ve been used as tennis shoes. I assume, civilized people that this column’s readers surely are, that you all know how to put a shine on your shoes.
You may have forgotten how good it makes you feel. As the songwriter (to be specific, lyricist) Howard Dietz put it, “Just a little bit of polish will abolish what’s bothering you.”
But a significant question persists: Do you go get a shine, or do you insist on doing it yourself? DIY is easy enough and brings the sort of pleasure also to be found in polishing silver — the satisfaction of taking something old and tired and making it bright, shiny, and new through one’s own efforts. But when I’m in New York, you won’t find me giving my cap-toes a once over. Hardly a block goes by in Manhattan without a shoe repair shop, and most of them have a shine throne or two. They are just as ready to give your kicks a high-gloss, mirror finish as they are to replace one’s soles. If New York is where vagabond shoes are longing to stray, they have no excuse for being shabby.
And yet, at a dinner party a couple weeks ago, the subject of shoeshines came up, and soon turned into a disagreement over whether it was ever appropriate to get one’s shoes professionally shined. A couple of Washington businessmen sitting near me were laughing about how they were shining their shoes for the first time in more than a year. They started trading tips on getting a well-burnished, elegantly dull shine. They wouldn’t think of trying for a glassy finish — not only garish, it smacks of professional practice.
Who knew something as simple as a shoeshine could be so fraught?
I guess I should have known. Years ago, I traveled to London to interview an author I admired. I had a morning to kill before meeting the great man and realized my shoes were unpresentable. I must have wandered half the metropolis in search of a shoeshine stand, but no luck. Finally, someone pointed me to an entrance of the Underground and told me there was a shoe stand there.
And indeed there was. Right next to the automated fare machines was a tidy stand with rows of insoles, shoelaces, and tins of polish. Sitting behind the counter was a large man reading a newspaper, or at least I assumed he was by the size of the hands holding up a newspaper. “Excuse me,” I asked the newspaper, “do you have time to do a shoeshine for me?”
Slowly, the newspaper came down, revealing a scowling, bald-headed man with little in the way of a neck.
“Oi, mate,” he said. “I’d be careful who I call a shoeshine boy. I’m a shoe repairman,” he said in tones — cockney and menacing — suitable for a Guy Ritchie film. Up went the newspaper, which I interpreted as the end of our conversation.
For the longest time, I took that brief exchange as a telling window on British class-consciousness. But in the years since, I think I’ve come to understand it better. In the United States, we used to have a thriving literature of shoeshine boys who climb the ladder to become titans of industry. By contrast, in the London Charles Dickens knew, “shoe-blacks” were ragamuffin street urchins near the bottom of society. I wasn’t just suggesting he was lowly, but a lowly child. People get Glasgow kisses for less.
Maybe the dinner party businessmen were right. It just might be safer to polish one’s shoes oneself.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
