The cobbler sat in a shop the size of a closet with shoes piled to the ceiling. He did not sell shoes. He saved shoes. A heel wore down and the cobbler replaced it. A sole cracked and the cobbler stitched it. A shoe that should have died lived another five years because a man in a basement knew how to keep it alive. The cobbler was the doctor of the street. His patients were shoes and he never lost one.

My cobbler on Avenue B was named Salvatore. He came from Naples in 1948 and he brought one thing. A last. The wooden form that holds the shoe while you work on it. He said a cobbler without his last is a man without his hands. Salvatore had lasts for every foot on the block. He knew your foot without measuring it. He knew your walk. He knew which side you wore down first because everybody leans and the lean tells the cobbler everything. Left heel worn means you favor the right. Right toe scuffed means you drag your foot. Salvatore read feet like a book.

The smell of a cobbler shop was leather and glue and the chemical they used to blacken the edges. You walked in and the smell told you that things were being fixed. That is a smell that does not exist in the new economy. Nothing is fixed now. Everything is replaced. Your shoe breaks and you buy a new shoe. The old shoe goes in the trash. The cobbler would have looked at that shoe and said I can save this. I can put a new sole on this and it will last another three years. But you do not want three years. You want new. The cobbler sold time. You want novelty.

A pair of shoes came to the cobbler like a patient comes to a hospital. You dropped them off and you picked them up the next day and they were healed. The cobbler put them on the shelf with a tag and your name and when you came back he found them without looking because he knew where every shoe was. The shelf was his filing system. No computer. No database. Just a shelf and a memory and a man who could find your shoes in a room full of shoes because he remembered the conversation you had when you dropped them off.

There are no cobblers on Avenue B anymore. The shop is a juice bar. The lasts are in a landfill. The shoes go to the trash when the sole wears out and nobody thinks about the man from Naples who could have saved them. The last cobbler I knew charged four dollars for a heel and eight dollars for a sole and the work took a day and when you put those shoes on they felt better than new because the leather was already shaped to your foot. New shoes hurt. Repaired shoes welcome you back. That is the difference between a purchase and a repair. A purchase says start over. A repair says I know who you are.

See also: Barber Shop, Pushcart