So this happened to me yesterday afternoon. I bring the package in from the porch, and open the outer, shipping box. Inside that is the dark grey AE shoe box. I slide that out and open it to see the cream-colored protective shoe bags holding my new boots.
Then the smell hit me. I guess it's been 45 years since I smelled it: the smell of newly-made shoes. Certainly I've bought lots of new shoes since I was ten years old, but I don't remember that smell since I was a kid and my mom took me shopping at the Thom McAn shoe store out on Princess Anne Road in Norfolk.
Thom McAn was a Scottish golfer whose name and signature were taken up by Ward Melville for his shoe business in 1922. By the 1960s, when I was a kid, there were over one thousand Thom McAn shoe stores in America, including the one a few miles from our house. When I needed sneakers, my mom shopped at the Navy Exchange on the base at Little Creek where my dad was stationed. I wore a lot of PF Flyers, I think because they were linked to the Jonny Quest cartoon show. But for dress shoes--real leather, hard-soled shoes--it was Thom McAn.
When you walked into that store, the whole place smelled of leather. It was comforting. That's where I went yesterday when I opened the box from Allen Edmonds. All at once it was 1968, I was ten years old and bounding into the Thom McAn store again--the salesman measuring my foot on the Brannock device, using a shoehorn to slide my foot into the new shoe, getting me to stand up and then pressing hard on the toe box to see where my big toe was inside.
Outside, the world was spinning seemingly faster and faster. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, the Democratic Convention in Chicago spawned riots in the streets. Parents and older brothers were shipping out for, or already in, Vietnam. My wars would come later, but for that moment, I was safely cocooned in the warm smell of leather, my hard soles slipping on the carpet and tile of the Thom McAn store.
