At our last family reunion, one cousin walked up to another and said, “Man, what’re you doing wearing my shoes?”

The fellow wearing the stolen shoes looked down at the beat-up gray Reeboks. “Well,” he said, “I found them at the lake house; I didn’t know they were yours.”

Huddled, later, some of the women began discussing men’s obsession with their shoes.

One cousin said that every time she and her husband Cooly travel to his family home in Texas, as soon as they reach the Alabama line, he stops the car. “That’s where that son of a gun is from,” he says.” Remember? The one stole my cowboy boots.”

Women own shoes –lots of shoes. We own Blahniks, Choos, Prada, and of course those cheapies bought during one of our frugal fits following our credit card bill revelations. I have bad feet, old feet, but still I buy flirty heels to be worn with dresses I’ll never wear, dresses fit only for final resting. Some so short that they reveal Victoria’s Secrets.

So, by my reasoning I am justified in buying lots and lots of comfort shoes—soft calf pumps, strappy sandals, cushioned athletic shoes. The strappy sandals I wear only around the house because of my hammertoes. In my closet I have a basket brimming with maybes. Well, I cannot know whether or not I can wear them till after standing on my feet for a few hours. Then I can’t return them, so into the basket they go.

Men usually have only a couple pairs of shoes, casual and dress, and they can recognize them across a room of fifty pairs of feet if they’re missing. Don’t tell the fellow who lost his Reeboks, but we women would have trashed those babies a long time ago.

A high school friend of our son’s called my husband late one night and asked him to come get him out of jail. He had been arrested for DUI, he said.

My husband got out of the bed, grumbling, and getting dressed in the dark to keep from waking me up. Suddenly the overhead light flooded the bedroom. “Hey,” he said, “my docksides are gone.”

Forced to choose between his dress shoes or work boots, he set out in the boots to get the friend out of jail.

When he got there, he found the boy wearing his docksides, which he had borrowed from my husband’s closet the evening before.

No matter when the boy called after that, my husband refused even to speak to him. And it had nothing to do with his being a bad influence on our teenage son.