Please Pull For Service

Today I took a step, not a giant step a little step, a step back in time. Back to a time when fall approached and school was about to start. Back to a time when my mother took my sister and I to get school shoes at Roy's Shoe Shop.

Roy isn't there any longer but when I pushed the door open, the door covered with signs and stickers that indicate the store hours, handwritten on cardboard, the bells above the door and the aroma of old leather, shoe polish and some mixture of cements and glues ambushed me and I was drawn into the shop as if through a tunnel that led to a time machine.

Across the floor, past the vinyl covered chairs with the silver arms and above the counter the string with a handle made from the piece of a shoe mold holds a note that reads, "Please pull for service". I hadn't thought of that sign for more than forty years but when I saw it, when I held it in my hands an tugged on it, the sound of the bells at the other end of the string, the bells that hang in the working part of the shop sounded the same as they did when I was a little girl and my mother was the one to pull the cord. They sounded like my childhood.

The man who came through the door wasn't Roy, or Roy's long time assistant (I never learned his name) but his smile and approach were similar to Roy, a shy smile, an unhurried walk, calloused and black/brown stained hands, an expert inspection of my shoes in need of repair.

The orange ticket, handwritten with a Bic pen, is my ticket to return again to my past. It is my assurance that I can go back again, that I can walk in to that place, step back in time. I don't really care that the shoes I left there will be repaired (they aren't all that comfortable anyway), what I care about now is that my orange ticket will take me back there, take me through those doors and back through time to my childhood.