Desert Boots. Marvelous. I absolutely love these shoes (for men of course). I even wish that I could wear them. AND, I have always loved them but never before did I know what they were called. In fact, a few weeks ago my mom and dad and I were out to lunch after church and for some reason or another I started asking them about when they had first met. He was 15, she was 16. They were on a hay ride for youth group. Not the hypo-allergenic neatly bailed hay rides of today, rather a tons-of-hay-every-where-in-the-dark-bouncing-around-on-some-country-dirt-road-and-a-kid-might-fall-off-the-wagon-if-he’s-not-careful hay ride. Shocking. “So, how did you actually meet?” I asked. “Were you sitting next to one another?” A shy smile covered my dads face as he looked down at his food, “She took my boot.” “Wait. What?” Looking over at my mom I see that rare kind of full-faced smile as she nods rememberingly. “Why did you take his boot?” I ask. Still nodding and smiling, she shrugs. “You just TOOK it?” More nodding and smiling. ”Dad, she just TOOK your boot off of your foot?” Now he’s nodding with a shy smile all over HIS face. ”Okay wait, you had never met…” Nodding. “…you didn’t KNOW each other…” Nodding and smiling. “… and without a WORD you just reached over and TOOK his boot?” Nodding and smiling and laughing. “PLEASE explain this to me?” I say exasperatedly. “Well, this boot came up out of the hay so I pulled it off.” My mom explains. “You just pulled it off? Wasn’t that hard?” “Well it was a desert boot.” My dad answers for her. “A desert boot? What’s a desert boot?” My dad shrugs, “It’s a kind of boot that was really cool back then.” “So you took his desert boot.” Nodding and smiling. “What did you DO with it?” “I held it over the edge.” Says my mom very matter-of-factly, as if to say, “Daughter, I was flirting with a boy I didn’t know, and I was a sophomore in high school, what do you THINK I did with his boot.” I shake my head with disbelief as I return to the sandwich in front of me as I try to picture my parents as teenagers giggling and flirting on the back of a wagon, covered with hay and high-schoolers, having their desert boot moment on a warm Jun night on a dirt road in Pennsylvania. (As the story unfolded they both simultaneously told me that it was June 15, 1972 on Tanner Road. I asked them how they remembered all of that, they looked at each other, then looked at me and said, “Well… it was the day we met, of course we’d remember.”)
