I haven’t been this excited about a pair of shoes in a long time, probably since I bought my only pair of Manolos for my best friend’s wedding in the pre-kids era. I saw these boots in a store window a couple of months ago, and I fell in love with them. It’s not the beautiful brown color, the inner fabric resembling British wall paper, or the fact that they have satin ribbon for laces. It is nostalgia. Pure nostalgia. Because I have a history with Dr. Martens. When I was fifteen, as I was dating punk boys, and had a liking for alternative music, short plaid skirts, and anything that would horrify my parents, I asked my cousin, who was traveling to London, to get me a pair of black, ten hole, Dr. Martens. I didn’t like eight hole, steel toe ones, which was the only thing you could get in my Spanish town back then. So I was very excited when he came back with my boots, that I paid with the allowances I had saved for months (I know that this story would be more enticing if I had earned that money working, but it was Spain, and teenagers don’t work there). As the ones I just bought, they smelled like leather, and were extremely comfortable (I never convinced my dad of this). Actually, they were so comfortable that I wore them for five straight years, all year long. They started college with me. They went out endless nights in Vitoria and its bars. They made it back to England with me when I went there to practice English for the first time, the summer I turned eighteen. And I just stopped wearing them when they had a hole big enough to fit my toe. If my mother hasn’t thrown them away, as she swore she would many times, I will take a picture of them to post it here when I go home for Christmas. They deserve some sort of homage. I hope that the one’s I bought today last as long, and I can write about them in fifteen years, at which point I will embarrass my kids instead of my parents when I wear them.
And since I am getting old enough to be nostalgic, maybe this January I will ask the Three Wise Men (aka Reyes Magos) to bring me a pair of Panama Jacks like the ones that preceded my Dr. Martens. I just checked, and they are still selling them. And they even have them in green!!!