Boots: Take 1

I bought these boots when I lived in New York. I worked in a grey cubicle on the 30th floor of a building on 3rd Avenue. My cubicle wasn’t next to a window, but I considered myself lucky because I could see the window from my desk. Just a little bit. I could see sky and the 30th floor of some other buildings.
I’d been looking for boots for months and must have tried on hundreds of pairs. I wanted some that didn’t wrinkle at the ankles and were tight on my calves. These ones fit the ankle requirement pretty well, but there was a gap at the top between the boot and my calf. So, I paid the $200 and then took them to a cobbler in Astoria. It was a long walk from the part of Astoria where I lived. I had never been to that area before and, it was dark out when I got to the cobbler’s. He was an old man with a thick accent. He seemed not only from another place, but another time. His whole shop was like stepping into a Greenfield Village exhibit, but finding it full of soul. Anyway, I left my boots there for a week to get the tops taken in and an extra layer put on the bottom to protect the soles. I can’t remember what those are called, but the women in my office told me I should get them so that my boots would last longer.
Once I picked up my boots from the cobbler, the tops were tight and as a result the ankles wrinkled. I was so upset. Why aren’t there any boots that fit right?! Are my legs that weird of a shape? God!
I never wore the boots with skirts because I was so self-conscious about the wrinkly ankles. They reminded me of 80’s slouch socks with clunky heels awkwardly hanging off the bottom. Or of my mom’s ancient riding boots that she had kept in her closet with rolls of yellowed and frayed newspaper in them since she went to college before I was born. But I did wear the boots with my grey or black slacks (I had a brown pair of ankle boots for my navy slacks). My legs looked so much longer. They made me taller than all the women in my office, except Kimberly, and I was eye-level with my boss. I found excuses to escape my cubicle to go downstairs and walk the long marble corridor that connected the 3rd avenue building to the Lexington avenue building. No one was ever in that corridor, just the clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat, clunk-pat of my heels. At lunchtime, I walked on the street between the buildings, past construction workers sitting on the sidewalk, backs against the cement wall below the Dress Barn shop window. I felt like my grandmother walking past whistling construction workers on her lunch break from the Dublin uniform factory in the 1940’s.
Now that extra layer on the bottom has long since worn through and I haven’t replaced it since I don’t wear the boots anymore. I tried wearing them twice when I lived in Berlin, but walking on well-worn cobblestones was difficult and the distances were too long for heels. Now, the square toes are sooo not cool and who wears heels that high in Ann Arbor anyway?