The handy kit that Tom left me. The black polish had… changed.

This is one of those posts about aging.

I’ve never, even in the full vigor of youth, been good at remembering people’s names. I mean, even good friends’ names. It’s not about the people; it’s about the names. Some of them just elude me. Take Paul Giamatti, to use someone everyone has heard of. I have enormous respect for him as an actor. Whenever I see him, I think, “This is going to be good.” But whenever I want to say his name, I have to check IMDB.

Now, I’m getting worse with words in general. I haven’t slept all that well in recent weeks, and it’s had a bad effect on my vocabulary. This is distressing, because words are my thing. Yesterday afternoon, I got stuck for an easy one, and it didn’t come to me until just after 11 a.m. today.

My daughter is about to get married, and I thought I’d better shine my shoes — at least one pair, anyway. I had not done this in a long time. I decided some years ago, long after retirement, that I could get away with wearing one of my pairs of black Salomon trail shoes — either with my usual cargo pants, or, on rare occasions, a coat and tie. Who notices?

So I opened the convenient little shoeshine kit that Tom McLean willed to me when I succeeded him as editorial page editor in 1997. I saw him get the kit out of his desk one time to prepare for some forgotten occasion (gentlemen did that sort of thing in 20th century), and admired it. When I moved into his office later, I found the kit with a post-it note that said something like “I won’t be around to keep you out of trouble, but at least I can make sure your shoes are shined.”

That’s the kit pictured above. But you’ll noted that the black polish has kind of… decayed over the years. It looks like bits of lava dusted with volcanic ash. So I decided, in light of the occasion, to buy some new next time I was at Walmart.

Volcanic debris?

That did not go well. I guess I should have gone to a shoe repair shop. What I think of as shoe polish is apparently not a hot mover at Walmart these days. On the rack where it should have been, there were various products such as bottles labeled “sport polish” for keeping your sneakers white (if they’re not black like mine).

Oh, there was one item labeled “black shoe polish,” and it was in a can, but it looked screamingly generic. And if my daughter’s getting married, and if I’m only going to buy the stuff once every 30 years or so, I was determined to get some Kiwi.

I didn’t feel like driving around to repair shops and such, so standing there in Walmart, I quickly ordered a can of Kiwi black from Amazon. Then I thought, “How about those other old Johnston and Murphys? You know, the ….”

And I couldn’t think of the name of the color, even though I’d known it and used it (just not lately) since I was a child. I had the color in my mind’s eye, but not the word. I thought about it as I did the rest of my shopping. I thought about it when I got out to the car. As I was waiting at the light to pull out onto the road, I became convinced the word had to start with a B.

The closest I could get along that road was “burgundy,” and I knew that wasn’t it. And no, it wasn’t “brown.” I’m not that far gone.

In fact, it doesn’t even start with a B. Alas. More words should start with a B.

I was worrying about it again this morning, and I was about to go into another room and ask for my wife’s help, when bam! It came to me.

Yes, the word is “cordovan.” The second-most-common color of shoes I have worn in my lifetime. I had a can of that in the little shoeshine kit, but I’d left that at home when I went to Walmart.

In my defense, it wasn’t an easy word to work out detective-style. I can’t deduce it from Latin, or from some cognate in another language with which I’m familiar. I couldn’t arrive at it from the proper name “Córdoba,” or “Córdova,” because I don’t associate that place with that color. Anyway, I’ve never been there.

It’s discouraging. But at least I’ve thought of it now, so I suppose I’ll go do something useful instead…