By Ashley Lodato
You can’t help but love living in a small town. At least, that’s Richard Hart’s philosophy after his great shoe debacle of November. Richard attended the annual Spinners and Weavers Guild sale, where he removed his shoes at the door, as so many of us do in our own and each other’s homes. After the sale, he stepped into his shoes (or perhaps I should write “his” shoes, because surely you can see where this is going) and took his wife and his mother-in-law out to breakfast at the 3 Bears Café.
While the Hart-Westendorfs were enjoying their breakfast, one of the 3 Bears staff members came over to Richard with a phone saying “Are you Richard Hart?” Richard nodded yes, and the staff person proceeded to tell him that it was someone from the Spinners and Weavers on the line, informing him that he had forgotten his shoes at the event.
Richard glanced down at his feet and it was only then that he noticed that although he was indeed wearing shoes, they were not his own. He had walked out of the sale in someone else’s shoes. That person, upon realizing that his shoes were gone, had left the Spinners and Weavers in his socks and driven to Winthrop Mountain Sports to buy a new pair; he was from out of town and couldn’t well endure a whole visit without any shoes.
Meanwhile, at Spinners and Weavers the women started thinking through the whole incident and deduced that since there were only two men at the event, it must have been Richard who walked out with the other man’s shoes. Someone knew that Richard was heading to breakfast at 3 Bears, they found him, and the mystery was solved. Richard abandoned breakfast, zipped over to Winthrop Mountain Sports, found a man in socks browsing the shoe section, and was able to return the shoes to their rightful owner.
If you were the person who lit fireworks between kilometer markers 3 and 4 on the Community Trail on New Year’s Eve, it would have been nice if you had skied out the next morning and cleaned up the trash left all over the trail. I would have done it myself, but I was too cold to stop (although right after that, I saw a woman skiing with no gloves. I have always assumed that at 5 degrees covering one’s hands while skiing was not optional, but to each her own I suppose).
Warm thoughts to all for a bright new year.
