“Roto-Shine” by Geoff Kronik (Fiction ’12)

Roto-Shine

My nephew and his bride exchange vows by the sea under a burning July sun. They are pale
silhouettes to those of us on his side of the aisle, who must gaze directly into the brilliance. I
look down for relief and see my late father standing over me, the two of us mirrored in my glossy
dress shoes like an afterimage. Instantly I fast-forward to a familiar concern: what will befall his
old Roto-Shine Electric Shoe Polisher when I am gone? The anxiety passes in time for “I do.”

Rise and SHINE…the quick, easy economical way, with the modern polisher that keeps shoes
store-bright. Say goodbye forever to polish-stained hands and after-shine mess!

My mother might have thrown out the Roto-Shine, along with its instruction manual’s cheery
exhortations. She saved vintage letters or photos, as these signified people and people mattered
to her most. But a working 1930s radio, ornate playing cards from Habsburg Vienna,
indestructible metal toys from Germany, or a sturdy machine bearing brown and black smudges
were for the most part inanimate stuff to her.

To me, objects represent the people who bought, held, designed, manufactured, used, and
enjoyed them. All of the above items and more wait in my closets, growing older and for me,
ever more dear. My mother’s lack of sentimentality towards them baffled me, although I envied
her lightness: she never pondered the Roto-Shine’s fate. Then again she never used it, and there
is the bigger question of whether it is truly inanimate.