Happy Birthday to Alice!
August 24, 2012
Today Alice turns 97.
She sent me an e-mail yesterday telling me about waking up in the middle of the night feeling sad because she does not own a “decent pair of bedroom slippers.”
She often has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she wrote, and so she must wear stockings to bed so that she can slip into a pair of shoes for this journey. (By “stockings” she means nylon footies.) “I cannot put my poor old aching feet in bare shoes. I know you do, but I just cannot.”
How uncomfortable. I had no idea she was wearing those things to bed. So off I went last night to search for slippers at the mall.
My old friend Kathy kindly agreed to join me. We’ve known each other since 1969. In all those years, we’ve probably gone to the mall maybe three times. One of those excursions was with Alice when she turned ninety-five.
Kathy and I ended up with three boxes of slippers for Alice to try on because, although her description above sounds like she’s never had the money to purchase a “decent pair of bedroom slippers,” the fact is that she has spurned one pair after another.
Since she moved here from Iowa I’ve bought maybe seven or eight different kinds of slippers for her – some quilted and satiny with bows, some fuzzy, some like little on-the-go flats with wrinkly heels that you have to stretch out first in order to slip into, some moccasin-like with faux leather fringe and plastic beads across the toes (an insult to the tribes we grew up around), some with fake fur lining, etc. She had a little honeymoon with each pair and then gave up on them.
Genuine Moccasins (19th c. Northern Plains)
Alice is outraged by every price tag she’s ever seen on a pair of slippers and insists that I buy inexpensive ones, even though I’ve pointed out that we’ve probably spent maybe $200+ by now on slippers.
“I don’t know what’s happened to my feet,” she said the other day. “They don’t even look like my feet any more. They’ve gotten so…thin, I guess you’d say.”
This is true and might explain the problem. Her feet no longer look as plump and shapely as they used to, and slippers don’t bring the comfort they once did, but we had to try.
Kathy and I also searched for a plain-colored, 3/4-sleeved, cotton blouse for Alice, her favorite item of clothing, but we quickly became discouraged. The number of hideously ugly blouses hanging on racks and biding their time until they meet up with a landfill is staggering.
We got a bit lost in Macy’s and asked for blouse help from a fey character in a distant corner of the store, a fawn-eyed clerk wearing black, rhinestone-studded glasses. She spoke so softly and queerly and with such odd tilts of the head that it wouldn’t have surprised us if the dressing room door behind her would have blown open onto a sunlit meadow aflutter with fairies.
“Go down to the third floor,” she said in her whispery voice, “and turn left.” She paused and smiled knowingly. “Or turn right. You’ll find what you need there.”
Off we went down the escalator, hardly knowing what to expect. I had an unsettling feeling that she knew our needs better than we did.
But there on the third floor, which was empty of other customers, we turned left and landed on exactly the right sort of tops for Alice, not blouses (just forget blouses) but other sorts of things she likes.
A tiny woman in our age range appeared out of the vast silence to ring us up. She told us that her mother died last year, age 92. Even at that advanced age, she was still driving her car, still (a Mennonite) kneeling to pray each night with a cloth around her head, her long hair falling down her back, still encouraging her daughter, now a grandmother herself, to live life fully and to always know she was loved, no matter what. Her grieving daughter started to cry and so did we. We all hugged after she rang up our purchases. (And I thought of Kathy’s mother, gone many years now, and was reminded, How precious, how precious… So maybe meeting this woman was my need when directed by The Woman Upstairs, after all).
And so it is now a new day, Alice’s birthday, and soon I’m going to deliver slippers and chocolates and honey almond cookies and a soft purple top and a soft rose-colored top and some stolen roses to Alice. I’ll add them to the nibbles and conserves my good friend Justin sent Alice (delicious treats from Harry and David – thank you, Justin!), and the jam sent by Lucille (quite generously, considering that Alice won’t tell Lucille who her father is), and whatever else she’s accrued from various people over there at The Place where she is now one of the most senior of senior citizens.
Wish us luck with the slippers.
Here’s a recent picture of Alice:
(Thank you, dear Kath, for all the odysseys we’ve been on together. Many more to come.)
P.S. I just called Alice. All week she’s been saying she doesn’t want to go anywhere for her birthday, but now she wants an outing. A free copy of Roses Are Red, Shoes Are Black to the first person who can correctly guess where it is she wants to go today. Put your guess (one per customer) in the Comments section below.
August 24, 2012 at 11:31 am
The Dollar Tree! I know she loves it there.
Thanks for continuing to post about Alice. I love her verve. And yours as well.
August 25, 2012 at 9:48 pm
There’s a new Dollar Tree, and I want to take her there. She loves filling up one of those green carts. I think I just got it that they’re green like…dollars, right? I’d never make it in marketing. Too slow to make connections.
August 24, 2012 at 11:40 am
I think she wants to go to Goodwill.
August 25, 2012 at 9:45 pm
Hmmmm….
August 24, 2012 at 11:45 am
Out for ice cream sodas? To the Washington Park Rose Garden? For pie?
August 25, 2012 at 9:45 pm
I want all those things.
August 24, 2012 at 11:48 am
Target?
August 25, 2012 at 9:44 pm
I do hate how very far away Target is, but I’d take her if she wanted to go.
August 24, 2012 at 11:49 am
Happy birthday, Alice! What a lucky woman you are.
August 25, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Thanks, Jane. I wish you’d come visit one of these days, please.
August 24, 2012 at 11:53 am
I’m betting on the dollar store !
August 24, 2012 at 11:54 am
Do so enjoy your blog.
August 25, 2012 at 9:42 pm
Thank you, Alice. Lovely name you have.
August 24, 2012 at 12:06 pm
it is so appropriate you are bringing our Alice shoes/slippers for her birthday! Enjoy your day together!
August 25, 2012 at 9:41 pm
Thanks, sweet Kerry.
August 24, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Happy Birthday, Alice! I am raising a glass of hootch in honor of this special day. My guess is that today will be full of Goodwill.
August 25, 2012 at 9:41 pm
Gordon, she’ll love this. She still laughs about the hootch you gave her.
August 24, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Happy Birthday to Alice!
August 25, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Thank you!
August 24, 2012 at 1:46 pm
your place?
August 25, 2012 at 9:39 pm
I’d love that but she’s leery of the ramp. Right now the river is low so the ramp is steep. In wintertime the ramp rises and is easier to navigate. Of course then it’s raining all the time, so…no visits.
August 24, 2012 at 5:09 pm
Happy Birthday, Alice! Enjoy your day, then get back to work on those stories!
–Just Another Adoring Fan
August 25, 2012 at 9:36 pm
I’ll pass this on, Art. She needs a little nudge.
August 24, 2012 at 6:21 pm
I guess it’s still relatively early in Portland so another Happy Happy Birthday to the fine lady with the silver hair looking so stunning in what I can see is purple. It’s a bit “out-there” but I’m going to guess Alice wants to go to the Ocean!
August 25, 2012 at 9:35 pm
If only!
August 24, 2012 at 8:09 pm
Hope that she likes the slippers. My mom has been going through the slipper thing over the past year or two. She hardly ever wore them, until recently, and now, none of the slippers she had, or has since bought, have been good enough. Same with sheets. About 3 years ago, suddenly all of her sheets were not soft enough. We’ve spent several hundred dollars on sheets (she has a king-sized bed), and she’s been Goldilocks, “These sheets are too rough”, “These sheets are too slippery” (the silk sheets she had to have), “These sheets aren’t slippery enough, and I can’t move around easily.” We did, finally, find the “Just Right” sheets.
Happy Birthday, Alice! I’m guessing you want to make the rounds of the thrift stores, and have a hot chocolate at Starbucks for your birthday!
August 25, 2012 at 9:35 pm
I’m glad you finally found the right sheets for her. I wish we could shop together for these things – slippers, sheets, whatever they want or need. I think we’d have a good time.
You know Alice very well to guess thrift store and hot chocolate. I think she’s off Starbucks for the summer, but as soon as the rains come we’ll be regulars again.
August 24, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Happy Birthday, Alice
Your Brother Lew would be proud of your 97 years of fortitude and independent attitude!
Hope you had a nice time at the dollar store (that HAD to be where……)
August 25, 2012 at 9:25 pm
Thank you, Shirley. I’ll pass this on.
August 24, 2012 at 11:02 pm
for hot chocolate? I’ve been going through the slipper thing with Mom too – and she’s only 81!!!
August 25, 2012 at 9:25 pm
May there be many years of slipper searching ahead for you and your mom, Sue.
August 24, 2012 at 11:03 pm
and Happy Birthday to Alice!!!! – and what a great daughter you are!!
August 25, 2012 at 7:38 am
My mom too had so many pairs of slippers but none were right for her. The last Xmas I had with her I lucked out and found a pair of purple slippers with pink flowers at a market here in Paris. They were all-felt, hand-made by a small family owned company in southern France. Mother absolutely loved them and she wore them non-stop except when she left the house or went to bed. They came up the back so fit like a shoe and didn’t slip off, they were wool so were warm, and on the bottom were little anti-slide dots so she wouldn’t fall. She told me over and over that they were the most comfortable things she had ever put on her feet. When I went home last June (following that Xmas) she was still wearing them in the heat of Kentucky summers. I asked her if they weren’t too hot but she said they were just perfect. When she died two months later and we had to give the clothes to the undertaker to dress her my sister who took care of mom insisted on her being buried in those slippers. She said they were the only things she would put on her feet and that she was going to enter eternity with them on.
Andrea, I hope you have such good luck with your slippers present for Alice. And, please give her my belated birthday wishes….Joyeux Anniversaire !
August 25, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Oh Nancy, thank you for this. I’ll send you an e-mail in a little while. I love this story of your mom and her French slippers.
August 25, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Andrea, you are on a roll with this post. It made me laugh! I am the recipient of a pair of spurned slippers. Although I will admit I spurned them myself because I agree with Alice, they were too slippery and loose. Of course my little heart started racing when I saw the authentic moccasins…I want those! And yes, it is hilarious but true that your feet lose fat as you age. What’s that about? Kathy, such a treasure. And of course it’s The Dollar Store, but I am behind in responding so may the best first responded win!
August 25, 2012 at 9:53 pm
I remember those slippers!
Yes, the real moccasins are something, aren’t they? These are in a museum.
August 25, 2012 at 9:51 pm
All the replies to your comments, dear readers, showed up with a time stamp different from when they were written. Sorry! To find out who won this contest, see And the Winner Is… (next post). And thank you for playing the game.
August 26, 2012 at 2:03 pm
I’m so sorry we were out of town for Alice’s big day. What a fabulous post, Andrea. You captured the Macy’s shopping experience perfectly. They get their sales people directly from fairyland. And what a beautiful gift this story is to us.
I’ll bet Alice wanted another of those torturous trips to Red Lobster. I hope you found an acceptable substitute somewhere closer to home!