Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 23, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
In 1980, I stared through the glass window of a store in downtown Toronto and my eyes lighted on a pair of men’s brogues. There was nothing special about it; it was a typical pair of brogues, but it stirred me emotionally. I bought it.
I wore my brogues at every formal occasion and took them with me when I went to work in Grenada. One evening, Donald Rodney, brother of Walter, who also worked in Grenada, invited me and my wife to a party. That was the last night I wore my Toronto brogues.
It was a moonless night. I had to walk about a quarter of a mile from my home to the main road. The road was typical of those in Georgetown with humongous craters. I walked into a muddy crater and my brogues were water-soaked. I packed my brogues in the container when I was leaving for Guyana and please believe me; that 1980 pair of shoes I didn’t know I still had until last Sunday.
It was put away in one of many cartons of vinyl records I haven’t touched since leaving Canada. Those cartons were stored away when I moved from Wortmanville to Turkeyen. Last Sunday while rummaging through the bottom of our walk-in closet, my eyes came across my 34-year-old brogues.
How interesting? I was due to attend the funeral of the mother of one of my daughter’s best friends, the third within a month (including my mother-in-law and Adam Harris’s son – all three just died suddenly; none were ailing). The idea occurred to me that after more than two decades I could wear my brogues again. But! Was it good?
I took my brogues flung it in the air and let it drop hard on the ground to see if it would fall apart. I twisted it in my hand. I contorted it in my hand. My brogues would not buckle. I decided I would wear my brogues to the funeral. As a back-up though, I put the Brazilian pair of cheap black shoes in the car trunk just in case my Canadian footwear collapsed.
At the funeral service at the MYO ground the shoes were hurting my insteps. I took them off. I noticed my daughter’s friends were smiling. That was logical; I didn’t wear them since the early eighties. My Toronto footwear purchased many moons ago stood the test of time. My brogues are a perfect pair of shoes. I intend to wear them at formal occasions for the rest of my life.
Do you know how many pairs of “dress” shoes I have bought since I returned to Guyana in the early eighties? I cannot count. None of the Chinese-made ones lasted more than a year. My wife bought me a pair of Chinese loafers for my 2012 Christmas. It lasted exactly five months. For my 2013 birthday, she bought me Brazilian-made moccasins. Those are what I wore to her mother’s funeral and the funeral of Adam Harris’s son. But in all honesty; I think they haven’t got long more.
The story of my 1980 brogues is amazing. I put on those shoes last Sunday and my mind went back to the days of my youth when consumer goods, clothes, cars, bicycles, manufactured things in general, would last forever.
Where has that age gone? Wasn’t that a golden era? My mom bought me a water-gun for Christmas when I was five years old. I cherished that gun as if it were human. Buried inside of it was the symbol of the person that I loved more than myself.
I showed that pistol to my would-be wife when she visited my home on Durban Street for the first time. I was twenty-seven then. That gun was new as when my mom bought it twenty-two years earlier. My heart broke when I got the news in Toronto that our Durban Street home had collapsed in 1980 and my gun was lost.
My wife bakes her chicken and meat in an aluminium pan we bought in 1979 from Honest Ed (a store in downtown Toronto that caters for immigrants). If you know my wife you could ask her. It’s true. We still use that pan and it is as shiny as any one you could buy in a Chinese store in 2014 in Guyana.
This column would run into thousands of words if I describe all the consumer goods we still have from our student days in Canada.
Today we can refer to this period we live in as the age of the rip-off. Consumer items, television sets, electrical irons, the whole damn lot, die within months. If only yesteryear’s world could return. Why can’t it?
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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