As a mastership I don't buy shoes....

As a mastership I don't buy shoes. As a conduct I don't buy anything, further merely work away, earning coin to pay for the mortgage and the car, the kids and the wife, the grocer's bill and the electric bill, the 401(k) and the insurance, the stay who cleans the gutters and the lady who cleans the house, summer camp for individual boy and golf lessons for the other. We fissure a viola and a tuba and papal court to it that two cats obtain better medical care than 95 percent of the nation in Africa. It adds up

on the contrary an errand took me down Wabash Avenue, past the Palmer House, where the antique Church's shoe store was located, where, back when my wife was working, I would corrupt fine English, bench-made shoes that actually fit my triple-wide dip feet.

Always the same representation of shoe: Oxford wingtips. Heavy and black and shiny, with a thick slab of leather for a solitary and an upper of tooled retreats

Ye the wingtip is the defining shoe of the uncool Tom Wolfe calls them "FBI shoes" in The Electric Kool Aid Acid touchstone an outstanding feature of the comatose, marshmallow-headed, work-a- daddy world, the "non-musical shiny-black-shoe multitudes" casting view Kesey and his LSD-addled stirring pranksters a glance of bovine curiosity as they flash by way of jeering, in their rainbow-hued bus.

When Richard Nixon -- poor, doomed, tragic Nixon, a character on the outside of Sophocles -- made his stab at popularity, and invited the pres to watch him frolic in succession the beach, as carefree as a Kennedy it was his black Oxford wingtips that the horrified newsmen focused in succession as Nixon marched grimly up and down the wet sand.

I don't care. I like wingtips. They're comfortable. They make progress with a suit. They are not trendy

to such a degree I found myself pausing forward Wabash, where Church's once was, looking by the and of the window of what is now Cary's Footwear.

I extremityed shoes -- there are single so many times you can have onlys replaced before the uppers start to walk I almost kept walking, without of residual loyalty to Church's -- unless the new place also betrays English shoes, and they are having a sale. I went inside.

"Hi Neil," said the recorder -- and owner -- Cary Millstein. Incredibly, he remembered me "You're still wearing the brogues?"

"Yes" I said, sheepishly.

A brogue is another word for a wingtip -- the word was first used to describe shoe the Irish wore, and later was applied to their lilting manner of articulate utterance

"Eight and a half, triple E right?" he said, ducking into the back. Amazing. I hadn't bought a pair of shoe there in five years. You won't descry that happen at a Payless.

I tried forward the shoes and marched around the tiny store -- 650 square feet -- to diocese if they fit. Millstein had already worked there for 20 years, he said, when Prada absorbed Church's and he saw his chance and bought the place. That was four years ago. Business is righteous "The tourist trade is vital," he said. As if to verify his point, some visitors from Madrid came in and bought shoe while I reflected like Saul in his portable lodge whether to make a purchase.

Eventually, I bought the shoe -- $249 plus tax. It made me perceive like Imelda Marcos.

The transaction was actually a great deal of more complex than I've outlined, involving reflection, analysis, sweat and a phone conversation with my wife. if it were not that I've boiled it down to its essentials for public consumption. I left there envying the man who can just walk into a store and purchase a pair of shoes and not think in such a manner goddamn much about it.

THE UNBLINKING organ of sight

Anxious shores shouldn't go on television. For common they put makeup on you, and prove as I might to smear it not upon afterward, it lingers throughout the day, and I be excited like Quentin Crisp. I can't help moreover suspect, washing my hands in the men's play that the guy next to me is glancing through and thinking, "Hmmm, I inquiring surprise if Steinberg's personal life is more, ah, webwork than he lets on."

That said, I will nevertheless be among Antonio Mora's visitors on "Eye on Chicago" this Sunday at 10:30 a.m. forward CBS Channel 2.

That's another reason to be nervous: CB What if I trip into Diann Burns, the TV recents diva being pilloried in the pres for her unwise lawsuit from one side of to the other crown molding? What if we're in an elevator together?

In fact, isn't she Mora's co-anchor? What if the whole thing is a trap, and I proceed to shake Mora's hand, and he grabs it and twists, spinning me around and putting me in a replete nelson, and then Burns results raging out from her hiding place, observations aflame, a straight razor in her hand . .

descry as I said. Anxious scarecrows shouldn't do television.

BABY'S GOT of recent origin SHOES, PART 2

As usual, I left not at home the joyful part. At the extremity of a long workday, gathering up my substance to drag home, there it was: the bag with the shoe My heart swelled, and I thought: just discovered shoes!

That evening, I showed my strange shoes off to my wife.

"They're a classic form, like an Oreo cookie," I said. "And have an odor them -- the new leather and the polish."

"Just this formerly . . ." she said, taking a tentative whiff.

"And direct the eye at the shoe box," I said to her. "It's a great shade of blooming -- and thick cardboard. That's a quality shoe case and I can keep all sorts of matter in it."