How To Be Unpopular

With lots of time on my hands, I find stray memories bubble up from the depths. Like this one:

Many decades ago, when we lived in Edmonton, my Dad took me and my older sister shopping for shoes. This was against the natural order of things. Mom did the shoe shopping, usually with all four of her girls in tow. When mom shopped the watchword was cheap. We couldn’t spend a lot of money because we couldn’t afford it.

Why Dad took me and my biggest sister shopping, I can’t completely recall. We may have had a Brownie ceremony to dress for. Father was a military man. He would have cared about how we looked in our Brownie uniforms.

We went to Woodwards in the Westmount shopping mall. I remember finding a pair of women’s shoes my feet were just big enough to fit into. They were tan loafers with a two-inch heel and a brass-toned decoration on the vamp. They were $16 – a serious amount of money for a pair of shoes. 

Dad was magnanimous. If I liked the shoes, he said, I should get them. So we bought them and took them home.

I was very proud of those shoes. I thought they were beautiful. All my friends heard the story of how my dad had bought them for me.

One day, I was walking home after school when a couple of girls from my class came up to me. I knew who they were but I did not hang out with them. They were more popular than me because I thought everyone was more popular than me.

They said they liked my shoes. 

My thoughts went to the story of how I had got them, how my Dad had broken all the rules and how expensive they had been.

They were not on that wavelength at all.

They completed their taunt – and it was a taunt – by saying that they had given a pair of shoes just like mine to the Goodwill the week before.

Here’s how clueless I was. I did not follow them.

I was only dimly aware that there was such a thing as Goodwill. I had not been taught, as those two girls evidently had been, that it was shameful to be poor.

It dawned on me later, after they’d walked away from me, disgusted at how dense I was, that they were trying to pick on me. 

The Goodwill joke must have been a favorite of theirs because, not long afterward, they came along and tried it on me again.

I gave them their own back. I said my mother had the week before dropped off to the Goodwill the coats they had on. 

They were enraged. They shouted at me for being mean and rude. They walked away, even more disgusted with me than before. Those girls never spoke to me again.