MY 2021 CHRISTMAS PRESENT FROM MY DAUGHTERS

My long-time friends, Lena, and her husband, Steven, created a company and started making specially-designed shoes about 12 years ago or so. They struggled with the Great Recession, Trump's trade tariffs with China and then COVID, not to mention keeping a start-up business from the jaws of failure. Through all of that, they have grown their company into a considerable international manufacturing and distribution company. They have really hit a home run, and it's a great success story now. But it was touch-and-go for a long time for them.

I could hear the stress in their voices back then, and while I couldn't do anything financially for them, I created slideshows of crazy shoes I found on the internet and sent the slideshows to them from time to time just to break the tension they were under. From personal experience I knew that a bit of comic relief was like a sip of water in a desert of heavy burdens.

For reasons I cannot explain, my daughters recently got involved. Kristin found the slideshows on my website and just totally cracked up and shared them with Jessica. It became a thing with them. Kristin found this Kelly personality (Liam Kelly Sullivan) on the web, who had a shoes video, and it inspired her to look Kelly up on Cameo. They then wrote a script (sans extensive profanity, for the record) for Kelly to speak to me, as only Kelly could, of course, and it became my 2021 Christmas present. So, that is the story. It is actually a very nice story, and in a very odd and profane way, one might rightly say it is a story of love more than one about shoes. As it turns out, love sometimes comes to us in curiously decorated wrappers . . .