shopping for shoes

I went shopping for shoes this morning because I stopped at the liquor store yesterday to pick up some beer. Allow me to explain:

Steve’s Liquor store on University Avenue is just down the street from the office building where I work, so on Friday afternoons I often stop in to see if they’ve got any beers that I haven’t tried before. There are still quite a few microbreweries in our state and all the state surrounding us, thank goodness, so it’s always a pretty solid bet I can find new beers to try at Steve’s.

They had quite a few new beers they were selling singly, so I asked the guy behind the counter for a box I could put them in. He gave me a flat, for whatever reason, but whatever, I took it and picked out a half-dozen single pint cans, then wandered down the aisle to see what they were selling in six-packs.

Lo and behold, they had a couple six-packs of WootStout, a well-known seasonal beer that’s in very high demand and not easy to get hold of. Popping open the cooler, I reached up to the top shelf to grab a pack, and that’s when the cans which were standing loosely in the box I was balancing in the other hand like a platter began to wobble and fall down.

In the chaos of the moment I tried to split my attention, half on the hand caught in the six-pack on the top shelf of the cooler, half on the box of loose, tumbling cans. Funny thing about that is, in my advancing age I have lost the ability to split my attention for even a second. I know this, but muscle memory kicks in even when I don’t want it to. Unable to keep my attention on both the box of loose cans as well as the six-pack of bottles, my brain seized up and let all that beer succumb to gravity.

The cans survived the fall just fine, but every single one of the bottles shattered before they hit the floor, drenching me from the waist down in beer. Best guess is, they must have hit the next shelf down and exploded from the growing pressure of the agitated carbon dioxide in the beer. It made a terrific noise that brought people running from all over the store to see if I was all right. Even though I was soaked in beer I somehow escaped without a single scrape or cut from all that flying glass.

One of the employees brought me a towel so I could sop some of the beer off my trousers, but by the time I worked my way down to my shoes it was too late. They were soaked through. I might be able to get some of the beer out of them with some patient blotting but they’ll only be good for yard work or stomping down muddy trails. I won’t be wearing them to the office again any time soon.

And that’s how I ended up shopping for shoes this morning.