A clean city with lots of shoe stores

I remember my mother taking me from store to store trying to find a pair of shoes that fit. My own daughter is fairly easy to shop for, but we must have gone into fifteen stores over two days to find sandals for her rapidly enlarging feet. In most of the stores, she wouldn't consider even a single pair. And of the ones she tried, none were comfortable.

I had asked her several times to look for girls in school with shoes that she liked, and find out where they got them. But she did not respond to this reasonable suggestion(!). In the second-to-last store the salesperson convinced her to try on half a dozen pairs. He offered one of the pairs, which she hated, about ten times. And we left empty-footed (figuratively speaking). I was about to give up when she mumbled something about Teva Naot. Lo and behold, a store selling that brand miraculously appeared, and we thankfully purchased the pair pictured above. Of all of the shoes she considered, this was the only pair I liked. We won't say anything about the cost. Sephardi Lady, life is not simple with teenagers.

On the way home, we passed a line of cars waiting at a traffic light. We saw a passenger open the door of one of the cars and gently lay an empty soft drink can, upright, on the street. I stepped into the road and told him, with a smile, that the can belonged to him. He shrugged his shoulders. I picked it up, handed it to him, and told him to throw it away. He took it. (I considered shouting my town's slogan, X is a clean city, as I walked away, but I restrained myself.) My son later said that I'm lucky the man didn't stab me, and that he probably deposited his can at the next intersection. Maybe my son is wrong, and the man was worried about what I would do to him . . .