Picture
from Dos Family amazing blog, found many months ago and saved in my laptop!
This
picture stopped me in my track and transported me right back to my younger
self, way before my teens. It also puts a huge smile on my face.
It may look
like a non-descript picture of an outline of shoe somewhat hastily drawn behind
a used envelope but it brings back so many good memories because half way round
the world, more than 20 years ago, my dad used to do exactly the same – tracing
the outline of my shoe.
I vividly
recalled him tracing my siblings’ and my slippers on random pieces of paper –
sometimes drawn behind a used envelope, calendar or torn pages of a company’s
annual report book - often the night before he goes away on holiday with the
best intention of coming home with presents for us. It was always dad who did
it, never mum.
Shoes
aside, whenever my parents travel, they tend to bring home little gifts for us
when we were much younger. Dad has a tendency to buy us the latest fashionable item from the country he visits which more often than not, is never
in-fashion/cool in our tiny town at the same time. These pieces of clothing
tend to be relegated to the back of the cupboard before the annual clothes
purge to the charity bin.
He once
bought my sister Ida and I some lurid printed mid-drift tops from Indonesia, accompanied
with his famous quote ‘Better wear these things now when you are young; please
don’t wear these bare-backed, pusat (navel) showing tops when you are 40.
People will talk and they will say - did you see Charlie’s 40 year old daughter
wearing that top!!??’ Oh that used to give us the giggles but now as our ages
are closer to the 40 mark instead of our teens, it sadly, cannot be truer!Wise words papa!
I remember my
first pair of Doc Marten shoes dad bought for me from London. It is quite possibly
one of the last few pairs of shoes he bought me before the holiday presents stop
as we turn ‘fussy and difficult to buy for’. It was the 90s, it was the coolest
shoes to have at the time and he was going to London so Ida and I put our orders
in. He took our slipper measurements on paper and came home with the goods –
Ida received a black ankle boots and mine was Mary Jane style. We feel like the
coolest people in Melaka...even in 30 degrees heat in Malaysia we wore our black
leather Doc Marten with pride.
The Doc
Marten shop must have left an impression on dad. He came home and told us all
about the store– the biggest of its kind at the time in Convent Garden. He told
us about the size (it has 4 (or 5?) shop floors), the range of shoes, the
customers who shops there (punks with spiky hair!) and the shoe lift! When he
puts his orders in, the shop assistance send a call for the shoes and the shoes
arrived in its own shoe lift! A shoe lift!! Dad was well impressed!
Unfortunately
the shop shuts down as the trend died away shortly after. I don’t venture to
Covent Garden much now but whenever I do, and if I passed by the building where
Doc Marten used to be, I am always reminded on the shoe lift and my first Doc
Mart that dad bought me.
