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In Best Form
Column
In Best Form
Mr. Bootblack is a philosopher with distinct views of his own. He earns a living cleaning shoes. Once every two weeks he writes an article about footwear for GDS – and about the wearers.
Sonny noticed it, my special ability which I hadn’t even noticed before myself. "Bootblack", he says, "how do you do it? Every time that you look up, a beautiful woman walks by!" I also then noticed it myself. That’s right. But I nonetheless protested to Sonny: "But now you have destroyed my dream", I said to him, "I thought they all looked like that!" But I didn’t tell him the truth – that everything is quite different. I had to first think about this some time and he wanted to talk above all about his New York Jets anyway which once again failed to make it to the Super Bowl although Sonny has been betting on them for ten years. The truth is: I look up only when a beautiful woman walks by. Because I can hear whether she is beautiful. From the clicking of her heels on the asphalt. The secret lies in her gait.
"The legs", Sonny exclaims excitedly. He sits on the chair and his shoes are almost done, but he speaks in a frenzy, "they either have it in the legs or they don‘t", and I think briefly about the old-fashioned seam behind the expensive stockings of a dear woman who walked by an hour ago. It is the gait, the gait on high heels whereby I nonetheless don’t want to say anything bad at all about shoes with no heels – I just don’t see them because I can’t hear them and women unfortunately don’t come to get their shoes shined very much at all anyways. "Sonny", I say, "you can go through life like all the rest of us without becoming a clever man. But you have to learn one thing: Legs are only an extension of the head. They make up what you’re thinking about" and I think about the gentle, dancing gait of a woman who smiles. I swear that I can hear whether she smiles-even if she only does it internally.
Sonny begins to shake his head in the meantime. "Bootblack", he says, "I know. But many simply don’t have it in them regardless of how much they try." At that moment, I hear her coming. Her steps sing and I already see her hips swaying in front of my internal eye before I actually look up. Her shoes are black and high and each individual muscle, each centimetre of leg is optimally elongated as much as possible. "It is an attitude, Sonny", I say, "and I swear to you that, with the right attitude and a smile on her face, each woman has it. They all have it. That and a nice behind."
Sonny looked at me as if I had gone crazy. "Bootblack", he says, "you are a clever man. But you don’t understand anything about American football."
