Saturday, April 23, 2011

Today's fortune: April 23, 2011

Today's fortune: A new pair of shoes will do you a world of good!

People joke with me sometimes that they're going to slip a fortune in to one of my cookies to make me do something crazy (I don't need any help, people). I thought my brother would be the first person to try this, but it turns out it was my loving wife Jamie.

I was convinced she planted today's fortune in the hopes that I would be forced to go shoe shopping today, and hence I would take her with me, and hence she would get to go shoe shopping! It was a brilliant plan!

But the fortune appears legit. So either Jamie didn't plant it or she's the world's only fortune cookie counterfeiter.

I pondered my shoe situation today. All told, I currently have only four pairs of shoes in my current rotation:

1. The Work Shoes. I have a pair of comfortable brown shoes that feel like tennis shoes but look like business-casual shoes. I wear them almost every day to work.

2. The Athletic Shoes. These are my weekend warriors. I wear them on Casual Friday. I cut grass in them. If I worked out, I would totally wear them to work out. And I'm wearing them right now.

3. The Silly Shoes I Already Bought Because Of A Fortune.


I actually do wear these shoes, as ugly as they are.

4. The Dress Shoes. Since my "Work Shoes" are only sort of dressy, I have a pair of actual brown dress shoes I wear whenever I put on a suit. They're perfect for funerals, weddings and job interviews.

That's it. I know most people have more than four pairs of shoes. I know I'm in the minority by admitting I only have four pairs. So when I went out grocery shopping today, I considered stopping by a shoe store to buy a pair of shoes and do myself a world of good.

But as I drove toward Payless, I thought about how strange it sounds that I have FOUR pairs of shoes... and in the United States, that's considered a very small number! In many countries around the world, people can't afford any shoes at all.

I drove straight past the shoestore and came home, where I surfed the Internet for a while and found the charity website Soles 4 Souls, which has a mission of collecting and buying new and gently-used shoes to give to people in need. (Full disclosure: the organization has been criticized for its practices of re-selling shoes in third-world marketplaces, but the charity claims not only are they distributing shoes to poor people, they're also creating jobs in third-world countries.)

The least I've ever spent on a single pair of shoes is about twenty bucks. At Soles 4 Souls, twenty dollars buys twenty pairs of shoes for people in need.

Instead of buying one pair of shoes to do myself a world of good, I made a donation and bought twenty pairs of shoes to do the world some good.

7 comments:

  1. Did you think about giving them the shoes pictured in No. 3 above. Huh? And maybe a certain pair of "bowling shoes" should go along with those pictured above. Huh?

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