The Happy Shoemaker
Angie was a summer student in our office many years ago, bright and cheery and trilingual English, French and Italian. And one day she introduced me to her grandfather.
Domenic was a shoemaker, carrying on a profession he had learned in Italy long before coming to Canada. For at least five decades he toiled over his bench in a long, narrow, and dark cobbler’s shop in the East End of Ottawa, walls lined with boxes of leather scraps and spools of thread, bins of brass rivets, and shoeboxes, dozens of shoeboxes, each containing repaired footwear waiting to be picked up.
The smell! Oh, the intoxicating smell of leather and machine oil and old wooden floors and benches, leather dye, and shoe polish. And from early morning until just before suppertime, six days a week, the place hummed with the whir of huge stitching machines and whirling polishers. The “whack!” of the riveter and the tap-tap-tap of Domenic’s hammer, the scraping of an ancient knife on re-built heels, and the occasional “ching!” of a cash register nearly as old as Domenic.
This was Domenic’s heaven, his place of peace and joy, of satisfaction and expression. It was here that he tut-tutted over every shoe that was brought in: “This-a shoe too small for you! Look how you make it split at the toe! I a-gonna fix that, make-a you shoe bigger. You don’t-a buy no more shoes too small!” He would fix you with a stare until you promised to start treating your shoes better.
Domenic loved shoes, and he loved leather, he loved his machines, he loved his customers, and they loved him. Every day was a joy for him, every shoe a challenge, every repair a masterpiece. He repaired my shoes and my briefcase handles and the case for my Leatheman, and once he proudly crafted a belt holster for my cell phone, long before such things were available at Staples.
He didn’t make a fortune, but he managed to buy a good house and raise a fine family who all became professionals, all of whom did really well because of two things. First, they had a work ethic to die for. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Second, they followed the example of a man who taught, quietly, that if you have to earn your daily bread, do it at something you enjoy, something you were born to do.
Domenic grew old, and turned the lights up a little brighter so he could see his work, and often he didn’t hear the bell when customers arrived, and the arthritis in his fingers slowed him considerably. Still, his work remained his joy, and you weren’t going to take that away from him.
Until one day the owner of the strip mall came by to tell Domenic that the lease would not be renewed, that the little mall was going to be torn down to be replaced by a grand new development. And soon after that, Domenic went home and stared out the window, and not long after that he went to the place all good cobblers go. If they have shoes in Heaven, he’s making them look good.
Domenic taught us that there are two approaches to your work: you can love what you do, or not. Which one is yours?