Me and my Buster Browns

I don't have a real shoe fetish per se. I mean, it's not a "fetish". It's more of a...well...a deep emotional attachment and a romantic/nostalgic ache over certain kinds of shoes.
There, I've said it. It started in toddlerhood. I had a pair of shoes almost exactly like these

Well, except they weren't *$(@)% $75 friggin' bucks. I am pretty sure they were purchased at my favorite childhood store: Buster Brown Shoes. [que violins]

The play area, the aged store owners and workers who had been fitting children's growing feet for 30 years, and who can forget the golden goose egg toy (plastic one...it was the '70s not the '50s people) you got after purchasing a pair of shoes.

I love shoes and you would never know it by the way I wear them. I wear one or two pairs all winter and a different one or two pairs all summer. It's not quantity, it's quality. It's really a metaphor for my personal life when you think about it. I have a small group of friends with which I develop deep and long lasting friendships which span decades. I am a woman who commits to my shoes and my friends. So when I say I like you, I mean I really like you. Now and thirty years from now.

When I found out that this shoe company (Aster) with the outrageously overpriced children's shoes were now making this style in women's sizes I felt this tug on my heart that I cannot put into words. I honestly don't care if they look like little girl shoes. I so totally want them to the point that I can't stand it. I found a site that has them for ~$55. That's still a lot on my shoe budget but if you consider how often and how long I'd wear them and the fact that I rarely, rarely find shoes I like enough to actually buy and commit to longterm...it starts to seem totally practical.
Ahem.

Here are the styles of shoes that I feel emotional about (in order of my deepest love coming first):

t-strap mary janes
sophisticated mary janes
t-strap sandals (can't find any I like right now)
saddle oxford/oxford shoes
tap shoes(adult)

I don't know, maybe when it comes to footwear I'm just stuck in childhood and afraid to grow up. Is there something wrong with me? But honestly, when today's women's footwear looks a whole lot more like an object of torture than something you could chase down a cab in then who is the one with something wrong?