Shoes - Katie Burke

My mom brought in the first bag of groceries, placed her keys on the wall-mounted, wooden key rack with my oldest brother’s green-painted handprint on it, and said, “There are more groceries in the trunk.”

(Throughout my childhood, that would be our cue, the signal for my two older brothers, two younger sisters, and I to scamper out and bring in all the bags, like elves. Forever curious, I never minded my elfin role, as I got first viewing rights to the week’s loot.

At that point, though, I was only six months old, not a fully formed elf and incapable of working at the Grocery Get: that assembly line between my mom’s trunk and our refrigerator, and often, the second freezer outside, where we stored the extra bread. Also, there were no younger sisters then, and the brother next up from me in age was only two years old. But every time the story was recounted to us, I could only imagine my mom walking in with her infamous “groceries in the trunk” line, as that was just the way of my world.)

Walking in behind mom’s grocery announcement, my four-year-old brother, the one of the green handprint, looked despondent. He moped over to my dad and said, “They didn’t sing the ‘new shoes’ song.” Seeing his forlorn face, my dad busted it out: “New shoes, new shoes! Christopher Burke has new shoes!”

My brother cracked a tiny smile, but the song didn’t have the same ring when sung by my dad. It wasn’t my dad whose voice he’d imagined blessing the new penny loafers my mom had bought him over the weekend. He’d wanted the recognition of his peers and his preschool teacher, the one who had started the tradition of singing to celebrate children’s new shoes (in retrospect, a dangerous ritual, as current economic times reveal such praise for consumerism to be the cause of our global demise), and ultimately the one who had forgotten my tiny big brother and his vested heart. He’d wanted lots of tiny voices to notice his shoes and break into spontaneous song, and my dad’s best efforts to compensate wouldn’t heal him.

Or so the story goes. That tale my mom became fond of telling. The one that made us know that when my brother got new shoes, we should sing, “New shoes, new shoes! Christopher Burke has new shoes!” Making light of this trauma, by being the voices he’d wished to hear back then, would get him to laugh over time. That would heal him.

When my two older brothers and I were teens, with two younger sisters aged 11 and 9, the joke was still alive. When my then-17-year-old brother walked into the house and placed his keys on the green-fingerprinted rack, toting a bag from Robinson’s May Department Store with a shoebox inside, I rang out, “New shoes, new shoes! Christopher Burke has new shoes!” And we all laughed.

Just like he’d wanted it to happen those 13 years before.