Something I Learned From My Father I am Buying a Pair of New Balance Shoes
Sarah (Qiuqi) Bovold
I
like to measure things with my index finger, which I learned from my father.
I am purchasing a pair of new sneakers at New Balance. For a long time, I’ve felt all the shoes from this brand look similar: a big letter N printed on both sides with a toecap as round as a baozi— —as my father usually says. I find a purple, white, and navy-colored pair displayed on the middle shelf under women’s footwear, and I love how simple the color scheme is. I don’t like a shoe that has more than three colors, just like I don’t like writing a story that has more than three characters. I don’t need that many colors to prove the gorgeousness of a shoe, and I don’t need that many people to join this story about me and my father. I check the shoe size: It’s an 8. It isn’t my size, not even close. I am honest to the young lady working here; I don’t know what size would fit me perfectly, since I’ve never had a pair of New Balance before. I tell her that I wear size 9.5 in my Nike running shoes. She nods and tells me I can start by trying on the 9.5. When I was a kid, my father liked buying me a pair of new shoes every other year. He said a pair of sneakers would wear out after two years, assuming I wore them a lot while jogging or walking. We shopped in many different shoe stores, but we had never been to a New Balance store. Whenever shoe shopping, my father would ask me to pick
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