By Ali Perry, Missouri posted April 12th, 2009
Growing up in a military family is rough. Especially when your mom is a bit out of it and your dad is at war for most of your birthdays. When dad would come home on leave, he replaced his spit shined army standard boots in favor for his worn down, 15-year-old, duct-tape-tailored, size-too-big-for-a-7-year-old-girl cowboy boots. I remember that when he was home, he never took them off. I’m pretty sure that in every picture of my childhood with him in it, the boots were there too. He was wearing them when he married my mom, when I got my first puppy, when he was teaching me to roller skate, at my first gymnastics recital, out in the snow building snowmen with his kids. Every memory I have of him includes the boots I deemed embarrassing when I turned thirteen.
Those boots were like air to dad. And when the soles finally met their doom in the jaws of the new family dog, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he cried himself to sleep that night.
That was a few years ago, and Dad has a new pair now. They don’t seem to fit him right though. He looks sort of foreign with them on. Its taken a while, but I think I know why now. Those boots weren’t just chunks of threaded together leather adorned with shiny plastic tape. They were like the stupid notches that you carve into the wall when your child grows. They wore the scars that were much like his children’s wounds. Those goofy looking decrepit books were his reminders of his baby girls, and his only son. They reminded him of us. And that’s why he hung onto them so long. They were his babies.
