Ornaments For Your Shoes, That Make You Smile Elita Sohmer Clayman

At the end of my first physical therapy session yesterday, the therapist Cheryl said “I like your shoes, they make me smile.” I was wearing pair of what they call now a ballerina style flat, except these are made from a fabric called Neoprene. Neoprene is a soft stretchable fabric used in shoes for people like me with bunions and hammertoes. They move with the feet and are kind of cute. However, what makes everyone comment on them, I buy online flowered ornaments and you clip them to the front of the shoes and voila, they really look classy and expensive. The shoes come from a shoe place online and are made for people with problem feet or who just want plain comfort. The bows come in various colors and wherever I go, to a store, to a restaurant, to the hair salon or on an elevator in a building; everyone comments on my shoes. It is the flowers made usually of a satin and shiny material that brings about these remarks.

Two years ago, I had a cat scan of my insides and even there, while all of us waited after drinking the drink they give you first for the scan and the waiting about thirty minutes for the test to take place, every lady in the waiting room and not looking forward to the oncoming test, noticed my colored bow, flat, bunion wearing shoes. I had to give everyone the online site where I bought the shoes and most of all the flower adornments. Even then, in the waiting room of a medical facility, they made someone smile or make a comment.

To make someone smile is a mitzvah (good deed) because smiles relax us into a bit of temporary happiness. A smile can perhaps even erase a bad memory,

 if you are thinking about a bad one. There is a nice saying that states “If you think you can, you can. If you think you cannot, you are right.”

Let us all try to make someone smile with a joke, a wink, a compliment, a phone call, and an email, an Ecard on the internet or a visit. There is a new thing where people in nursing homes or retirement homes get visits from outside folks who bring their dogs there for a visit. The  residents look forward to the visits and it perks them up so much, that the nursing help sees much more interest in life from the residents and gives them something to look forward to all that day. The owner stays with the dog and the people get to pet the pet and there are many smiles on their faces and it brightens their sometime lonely day.

A smile is a beam and a happy look and to make someone look joyful, makes us shine as the person initiating the smile. My simple, fifty dollar shoes with their fifteen dollar colored bows on them attached by a tiny metal piece to the front of the shoe; makes an ordinary and really plain shoe into an attractive and more expensive shoe. I could go on ten elevators in ten days and not one time goes by, that someone makes a comment about the shoes and the flowers. Of course, their comment is directed by the bows and they do not realize it is the bows. They think it is the shoe itself. If they saw the shoe and how plain it was, they might think it a high class bedroom slipper. It is not, it is a shoe with a normal sole and normal in piece in it. It is the colored ornament that I have attached, that makes it look lovely.

I went to a wedding, a very nice one in October in Virginia where all the ladies and young girls wore fancy high heeled shoes in silver, gold, and many colors and about fifty ladies commented on my Neoprene shoes with a turquoise set of flowered ornaments on them. They were all wearing high priced and high heeled glamorous shoes and I, the active adult senior was wearing for comfort, these plain shoes adorned with a pretty ornament. It is goes to show you that you need not spend lots of money sometimes to get compliments and comments on clothing or shoes you wear. I told the lady where I buy these flowered ornaments, that when she gets lots of orders from Baltimore, Maryland for her shoe pieces; she owes it all to me. I give out her online address when someone asks me where I bought them.

So the moral of this story is: let your shoes give you a smile, because it is nicer when you walk that mile. A saying I just made up for this article, but anyway, your smile makes you feel happier for a while.