There are a lot of things my wife can do better than me. After twenty years of being married, I’ve learned she’s better at is most everything do-able out there. She’s a better singer, a better dancer, a better speaker, a better teacher, a better mom (duh), a better worker, a better listener, a better storyteller, a better friend and a better spouse. She seemed to have the top medal platform locked down in pretty much every event and has an uncanny knack of excelling at everything she does.
This week, her supremacy trend came to a screeching halt. I found something she didn’t excel at. I tried it and was pretty bad, but she was worse! My dream at the top medal spot was attainable!
My wife is a terrible cobbler.
We’re not talking about someone who makes cobbler (she puts me to shame on that ten times over…especially her peach cobbler…mmm…).
Where was I? Oh yes, cobbler. No, the cobbler you can eat is something different than the cobbling we tried this week. For those who don’t know, a cobbler is a person who fixes shoes. Did I already mention that my wife is terrible at it?
Did I mention how we learned this?
You see, the sole of my favorite pair of black shoes starting coming off this week. This was discovered as I was getting ready for church and had only one pair of black slacks to wear, meaning I needed black shoes. I panicked as the time for church loomed closer and searched frantically for some shoe goo we had a decade or so ago. My wife looked for something to help fix the shoe and came up with a quick-dry epoxy. I tried a few dabs of the epoxy and couldn’t get it to work. While I searched for a pair of non-existent black shoes, my non-cobbler sweetheart tried her hand at shoe repair. Here’s how that went:
She put on some epoxy. Nothing. She put on some more epoxy. It stuck a little bit. She put on a huge squeeze of epoxy and…
…my shoe started smoking. True story. There was apparently some chemical reaction going on with the epoxy and the rubber on the sole. Pulling on the sole showed it was attached, even though it was still smoking. We were running too late to worry about why my shoe was smoking, and I grabbed the shoe and we took off to church.
Ten minutes into the drive to church I put my shoe on and found a huge lump where a foot should go! That smoke was apparently from an epoxy/rubber reaction that had melted the bottom of my shoe and created a huge mass of…rubber?…where that bottom had been!
This wasn’t a tiny bit of rubber, mind you. This was the size of an action figure! For any non-toy geeks reading this, that’s like putting three or four AA batteries together, a dozen bouillon cubes or 324 BBs. It was huge!
I was in a pickle now (which could be another unit to measure the rubber lump in my shoe, if you buy baby dills). I couldn’t get another pair of shoes now and was stuck with a lump-ridden shoe for three hours now! Three hours! You know how uncomfortable a tiny rock or popcorn kernel in your shoe can be. Imagine that 324 times bigger!
When I arrived at church with a new hobble in my step, I told my wife what happened (being a better planner, she’d arrived several minutes before me and my carload of latecomer dress-in-the-car children).
Her reply to my plight? With a smile she told me, “You’re welcome!”
And her smile at that silly lump (the shoe, not me) made me smile too.
…which is another thing she’s better at than me – getting others to smile through their troubles…even if those troubles are something minor like stepping on a pickle for three hours.
Kay RookhuyzenMay 18, 2018
Love the story and how you can always find hilarity even in tough situations! Hope you got some new shoes!