These Cougar Boots Were Made For Walkin’

Summer has not even been upon us for 3 weeks and already my daughter is harping on me for back to school clothes.

“MomMMMY!” she pleads. She is at that awkward stage where I am still called “Mommy,” but when she refers to me to others, I am her “Mom.”  The day I am called Mom to my face will be the day I actually fall into the cavernous culture gap that is forming between us.

“Didn’t you ever want anything special for school?” she asks, hoping for sympathy. And money.

(Cue crazy wavy lines that indicate a special flashback moment is about to take place…)

In the fifth grade I wanted nothing more than a pair of Cougar boots for the winter. If you are Canadian and born between 1968 and 1981, the YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.

Everyone from grade three up had Cougar boots in 1982, except for me. Oh, how I coveted those beautiful mustardy brown quilted boots. They had speckled and striped laces that looped through eyes and then closed to the top with hooks, like on a pair of skates. The leather was smooth, silky, and thick, like the callused hand of a lifelong blue collar man. The boots had a shocking red fleecy lining that made them warm enough to wear without socks, and the soles were dense foam that felt and smelled like dried rubber cement. (Yes; I had smelled, caressed, and handled them at the store. By that definition, they were my first boyfriend.)  When you walked in a pair of Cougar boots it felt like you were walking on Jell-O soaked sponges. My best friend had a pair and she let me wear them once at recess. She stayed inside that day to help the teacher, because there was no way she would wear my boots.

Instead of Cougar boots, I wore a nameless pair of ugly brown rubber boots lined with fake fur. It was yellow and matted like the hair of an unloved doll and it itched the tops of my feet right through my socks.  The boots had a built in heel that was supposed to look like real wood, but my cynical nine year old eyes knew they were fake. Their artificiality reminded me of the wood grain Mac-Tac my mother put on our chest freezer lid to make it look classy. But like the freezer lid, they embarrassed me and I hated the whole sham.  My stepmother bought them for me at the second hand clothing store. She was the same one who, when she saw me without them on, yelled that she would not be the one paying for my double amputation if I caught sever frostbite because I was not wearing my boots.

The grade five class at my public school left our boots, wet with Canadian 1980’s snow (it was cleaner and wetter somehow) outside the classroom in a line against the hallway wall. Even our teacher wore Cougar boots. We lined them up next to hers, from biggest to smallest, like a row of brown and red feathered ducklings next to their mother.

Every day at recess I made the walk of shame down the row of identical Cougar boots until I reached mine. They were segregated from the others, relegated to the end of the line. As everyone else fished their speckled brown laces through the hook closures, I was ramming my resistant feet into their cold wet prison. I prayed for an early spring so I wouldn’t have to wear those boots anymore.

In Cougar boots ice was more slippery (in the good way only children with strong bones can appreciate.) You could somehow run faster, and you walked taller. They were warmer, lighter and definitely socially cooler than any other boot available. In a word, the Cougar boot made a Canadian winter more FUN.  When the boots were new, you wore them with the tongue tucked in tight and straight up, laced all the way to the top, and when they were worn in and it got closer to spring, you folded the tongue down and didn’t use the hooks.

Sometimes when you ran in them, the hooks from each boot would get snagged on one another and you would fall, face first into the snow. But it didn’t matter. If you were wearing cougar boots, you were protected with an invisible coolness shield.

Oh, how I loved those boots. I wished they still made them. I’d finally be the coolest 36 year old kid in grade five.

So it’s a safe bet my daughter will be wearing skinny jeans and Converse shoes the first day of school this September. If nothing else, it will eliminate fodder for her future blog and/or therapist.