The shoes had been wrapped in a tattered high school sweatshirt and shoved into a plastic bag from a long-gone department store. Initially, they did not seem out of place to me. By the time I reached this bag, I had already emptied two other closets containing much the same type of merchandise: broken or out of date appliances, souvenir programs, half-completed photo albums, framed pictures with the hooks still attached. I never thought of my Dad as a hoarder. But, as I have learned from my own bitter experience, people’s perspectives about objects can change with the passing of time.  Certainly, I never thought I would spend an afternoon crying over the moldy baseball mitt my ex-husband had somehow managed to lose in a box of Christmas ornaments in the attic.

So, perhaps, in the wake of losing his wife and his oldest son, the gritty human detritus of Dad’s past took on a different meaning. Maybe that faded shirt, this yellowing program from a 1978 piano recital, that photo taken at Niagara Falls on his wedding day, had become, like the holy relics of saints, objects of healing and restoration.

Yet, when I removed the shoes from the bag, and rolled them over in my hands, their place in the closet became something of an anomaly. What could they have healed or restored in Dad’s life? They had been put away clean, with nary a trace of mud or dirt, as if he had wanted to preserve them. Yet, the leather itself, dried out to the point of cracking in several places, attested to years of hard use. Funny, though. Dad had never worked construction, and though he did love to hike, he was too safety-conscious to continue using shoes that no longer had any tread on the soles.

I stood up and took the shoes over to the kitchen table. As I gently placed them next to a stack of framed photos awaiting release from the cracked wood and plastic that imprisoned them, I noticed something balled up at the top of the right foot shoe. Gingerly unfolding a fading photo, I could see a 20s version of Dad grinning up at me, one arm draped around a young man of about the same age. The two were standing on the stoop of a two-story building that was likely in Brooklyn, where he came of age in the late 1960s. The handsome stranger with him was wearing shoes that resembled the ones now in front of me, only new and fresh.

That my father had secrets was not a surprise. There had always been closed doors and locked drawers in his life. He gave me all the affection that he could, but I knew there was a deeper well I could not tap. Yet, looking at the photo, all I could feel was joy. At some point, my father had known happiness. Carefully, I put the photo back in place, and wrapped the shoes once again in the sweatshirt. I would find a suitable place to lay the shoes to rest and, in doing so, free Dad’s restless soul to perhaps find that stranger again.