Your Shoes, My Problem

I am a wearer of comfortable shoes. This is not meant as a euphemism for lesbian, I'm talking strictly about footwear. And now that I take the train home most nights I have time and again congratulated myself on the fact that I don't have a penchant for heels. I'm also apparently a slow walker and thusly, any type of uncomfortable footwear compounds my problem.

But last night, I'm running late and on Thursdays, I cannot miss the train. I just can't. So, I'm doing my extreme short-legged shuffle as best I can but I know I'm cutting it really close. As I enter the train station there is a relative labyrinth of stairs I need to maneuver to get to my platform. The first flight is down and there is a woman in front of me. A young woman. Hunched over at an angle that blocks the stairs, both hands on the rails, and inching down the stairway. Her heels rival anything I've seen recently on the Project Runway catwalk. Because I'm so late, I'm starting to lose my mind...but she's so wobbly that I don't actually have the heart to try to pass her for fear of taking her down completely. But, after what seems likes minutes, we finally get to the bottom and I fly past her thinking about making a comment about her poor choice of shoes causing me to miss my train but I flashed back to the Tim Horton's episode earlier this week and decide against it.

Then, it happens again, this time on the extremely long flight UP to the platform. Frak, Frak, Frackity Frak people. Different woman, slightly different shoe style, same painful, aggravating result.

So, no, I didn't miss my train. (Better story if I had) But I didn't get a seat. I had to stand in the aisle besides a hugely obese woman eating an ice cream cone. She shot me a challenging look but may have been surprised that I wasn't questioning her odd choice of commuter snack (Go Trainers are, almost without exception, apple-eaters. Maybe I'll cover that in a future blog-post). Anyway, I was actually looking at her shoes. Comfortable, practical. I'll be that woman, size be damned, could have covered some ground in those puppies. Is that too much to ask?