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I bought some shoes at K-Mart because they were cheap. They looked comfortable - and they are comfortable - and so I was happy with my new shoes because I was now comfortably among a special class of people: People with boat shoes on their feet.

I don't really have a boat - though I do want one. I'm guessing most men who wear boat shoes don't have a boat either. I believe this whole thing got started by people who maybe once did own a boat at one time and started buying this style of shoe. My guess is that it makes you look rich if you wear a boat shoe because you are of a class of people rich enough to own a boat.

A boat shoe is a kind of tie-up/loafer, a contradiction of implicit terms, if you ask me. I'm not sure of this, but I think it was because of the paradoxical nature of the shoe that I wanted them - I thought even the cheap shoe looked rich. And so I liked my new boat shoes until I got home.

"They look so cheap," my wife said. "Look, they are already shredding. ...And that's fake leather."

"But I like them," I said. "I can just trim those loose threads."

"Well, please, please don't wear them to the wedding," she said.

My oldest daughter is getting married. So the next day I had to go get some more expensive boat shoes.

If you go in the shoe stores, there are all kinds of boat shoes on the shelves now. There are boat shoes of canvas, leather, fake leather, fake canvas and a kind of mesh, of either dark, tan and sandy hues, some nautical shades of blue and green, some with white soles, some with dark soles, some with soles made out of rope, some with rawhide laced around the edges, etc.

While I was in the shoe store looking at the boat shoes, my wife came in with a bag from another shoe store. "I got these on sale for you," she said. "What do you think? Tell the truth. I want you to get what you want."

I didn't like them too much, though the sale price was appealing. Basically, I didn't like them because they didn't look enough like a boat shoe. That is, it was just one kind of material and no rawhide and it just looked rather like a loose-fitting shoe. Actually, it looked cheap.

"I was thinking of these," I said, pointing to a jaunty little number made from four different kinds of material and kind of curled up at the toe.

She looked at them, expressionless. "You can't wear them to the party. You know that, right?"

Frankly, I had thought I could wear them to the party. Soon there were three pairs of tan-colored loafers in the new style on the floor - shoes with exaggerated length from the instep way past the toes, which are squared off kind of like an extra-wide cowboy boot. Then, somehow, the subject turned to dark-colored shoes.

"I thought you liked the tan shoes," I said. "Why did you ask me to put on the tan shoes?"

I had tried on one pair, but they had bright stitching, to which she objected. "I can fix that with some shoe polish," I observed, but she scowled at me. That's when I found the Rockports - same style but without the bright stitching. I thought they would appeal to her because they are $20 more expensive, and they did, but then she changed her mind. "They look too sporty," she observed. "You need some dark shoes."

"I have some dark shoes," I said. "I have the black tie-ups, and I have the weejuns. Plus I have that pair you bought for me last month that I don't like, and I have the old Bostonians in the tub in closet. The weejuns are dark mahogany. I can wear those."

"You can't wear those with your suit at your daughter's wedding." She stalked off to the men's formal shoe section and came back with a very shiny dark mahogany shoe with tassles.

"Here, you should wear this," she said. "You can't wear your weejuns to the wedding," she explained, "because the women will be wearing gowns."

"Huh?" I said, "I've got to wear shoes with tassels because the women will be wearing gowns?" That's when she walked out.

"Good-bye," she said, "I cannot deal with you." She went one way down the long aisle of boat shoes, and I returned to the pile of rejected shoes on the floor behind me. When I rounded the corner, there she was.

"Why don't you buy them anyway?" she said. "You can bring them back tomorrow."

- CharlieD'oh

Charlie Sneed blogs under the nom de plume of CharlieD'oh. In the past, he has actually been paid to write stuff, but this was in another time and place when he was functioning as a newspaper reporter, and there were "employers" who published news on paper. He turned to blogging as his hair turned gray because blogging takes less energy than journalism. You can read his blog here.