October Stories - Bootery Toggery

I cannot remember what kind of footwear we wore as little kids beyond the saddle shoes I see in our fading childhood pictures from ancient Sears photo sessions. I know we didn’t run around the neighborhood barefoot, at least not all the time, but we must’ve worn some sort of sneaker. Most of our candid photos from that time were taken during the summer or in the snow - bare feet or boots. Whatever we were lacing up, we outgrew them quickly, and regular trips to the shoe store were necessary.

There was a shop in the neighboring town of Lisle called Bootery Toggery. I can remember the store location, a little about the interior, and the store owner - not very much, though. A few things I do recall vividly were the dozens of homemade puppets that lined the upper shelves of the shop. These puppets were of the paper-mâché variety, with shaped and painted heads attached to a cloth body with limp arms that would come to life once a pinky and thumb were slipped inside. There were shelves and shelves of them, arranged and grouped in little, themed vignettes, which I found appealing and repellent in equal measure. For me, the puppets were impossible to ignore. I would only allow myself to look at them for a short time, turning away a split second before they seemed to twitch ever so slightly with life.

I don’t know why this shoemaker created these creatures unless his hands were willed to do so, and he was at their mercy. He must have an origin story that explains his passion - perhaps a particular event put him on this path. It must have been impactful because the sheer number of puppets and the care he clearly invested in creating them spoke to his obsession - was he a dedicated artisan, or perhaps a mild-mannered shoe salesman, taking on the personality of whichever puppet happened to be on his hand?

In between stolen glances toward the shelves, my mind would drift to a weird place, a gauzy nightmare of a place:

It is the end of a busy day when the store owner closes up, locks the door, turns the sign, switches off the lights, and nods off to sleep. It is only then that the rows of puppets come to life. The atmosphere created by the distant streetlights and the calm of the evening is disturbed only by the soft knocking of hollow heads and the shuffling of hand-sewn bodies - shadowy figures flopping over each other as they descend from their dusty shelves to resume pulling at the doors and scratching against the windows to get out. We witness a lone puppet moving into the light, where we can see that its face is vibrating and cracking as it tries to scream.

At that young age and in that over-tired, addled state of mind, this seemed plausible.

The duration of your stay in any store with your parents can be divided into sections: Excited arrival, patient waiting, quiet resignation, jittery agitation, and finally, a kind of torpor in which you slip in and out of consciousness - a dream state where half-thought thoughts and dormant fears can germinate into something terrifyingly real. With that in mind, it is understandable that a small child with an overactive imagination might think something to be, which simply is not. This is not what happened here, though. Those f***ing puppets were real.