There’s this picture, you see. It’s a fantastic picture. And the picture depicts my mom sitting out on the front patio of our house in Indiana. It’s from the back. She’s looking over her shoulder and smiling at the camera. She’d come home from work for lunch. So it was lunchtime and summer. She was wearing a smart, dark brown pencil skirt. A blue blouse with cap sleeves.

And a pair of fire engine red pumps.

In the late 70s, my mom found herself with three kids, divorced, having to move in with her parents. She had a college degree, in English, and worked as a bank teller.

We were poor. We had government cheese. We got undies and Fannie May meltaways for Valentine’s Day. Easter baskets filled with cheap chocolates and socks. Birthdays were big. But in the time of Gloria Vanderbilt and Jordache, Mom bought me Cheryl Tiegs jeans from Sears.

I was embarrassed to wear them.

It was all she could afford.

And the bleak truth was, she couldn’t even afford those.

She did without so she could give her children chocolates, undies and Cheryl Tiegs jeans.

Yes, those fire engine red pumps were cheap and scuffed.

But they were magnificent.

She rose through the ranks of the bank and eventually became the bank’s first female officer. As her reward, when the men had spacious, glass paneled offices on the first floor, they stuck her in a windowless room in the basement. She never said, but it’s doubtful her salary was commensurate.

She didn’t complain. She had mouths to feed, basketball shoes to buy, dreams to nourish. Hers were gone. All her days, she spent kicking at a glass ceiling to give more to her children.

But she did it in fire engine red pumps.

In later years, fed up with having to deal with garbage collectors collecting garbage during rush hour when people were trying to deliver their kids to school or get to work, she complained once, that I heard.

Then she decided to do something about it.

Thus began her campaign to become the first female elected to the Town Board. She did not put signs in people’s yards because, “They’re ugly and they spoil the view.” On her campaign, she spent only the amount of money it took to place one ad in the local paper.

It read:

Patty Lovell
Wife of Reg Lovell
Mother of Erika, Kristen and Gib Moutaw
For Town Board

She won by a landslide.

The garbage collection schedule changed.

She became President of the Town Board, and after her successful tenure, retired and did not seek re-election, “Because incumbents are killing this country, and I refuse to be part of the problem.”

She was a devout Christian with a puritan’s work ethic. She had been a majorette. She was valedictorian. She listened to the Everly Brothers, and not Elvis, “because he was too loose.”

Though the song that reminds me most of her is one she listened to often.

“I Am Woman,” by Helen Reddy.

And when she moved us into my grandparents’ house, there was not room for her to have her own bed, so she slept on the couch for years.

Her children had beds.

Our mother slept on the couch.

She had infinite patience with her children. She knew her second daughter was born to run. And when that time came, she hugged me, “Oh, Kiki,” and then she let me go.

Except for visits, I never went home again.

On my first real job that I got for myself in Denver after graduating from college, filling my car with clothes and my cassette tapes, and taking off for the great unknown, a woman who worked there walked into my office.

She was wearing thigh high, suede, fire engine red boots.

I looked at those boots and knew she’d be my friend for life.

She is.

Dixie is opinionated, elegantly outspoken, insanely cosmopolitan, frighteningly intelligent, ridiculously well-read, witty, stylish, and determined. She reminded me of a cool, droll, sophisticated heroine in a movie from the 40s. When I met her, she was getting her Masters in Library Science and had a goal to retire from a position held at the extraordinary architectural and informational achievement, the Denver Public Library located downtown.

Last year, she did just that.

My mother with her red pumps taught me to work hard, be responsible, be respectful and to stand up for what I believed in.

My friend Dixie with her red boots taught me to play hard, be myself, not take any shit…

And to stand up for what I believed in.

Today is International Women’s Day and today of all days we must not forget the women who came before us who helped shape us into the women we are. Be they blood ties, as thick as blood, or someone we never met.

And we must not forget the women who today stand strong to make a better tomorrow for our daughters.

We also must strive to be one of those women.

The voice of the sisterhood is being heard clearer now than it has in my living memory.

But for me, I will not ever forget those fire engine red pumps, that glimpse of screaming, feminine, stark, brazen, strong, beautiful personality that shone through even though in many other ways she was being held down…because she made it so that glimpse could not be missed.

In so many ways.

So many ways.

And when I saw them nearly twenty years later, I knew I’d never forget those fire engine red suede boots that were a dare, a challenge, the flying of a standard in shoe form that said, “I am here. I am me. And you take me as I come. There is no other option.”

I owe a lot to my mother and my friend Dixie. They guided the way to the woman I have become.

And today, as they deserve, I honor them.

Rock On.

PS: If you would like, in the comments below, I invite you to share the names of the women who have guided your way, and who still guide your way, so that you can honor them, and we can see them.

I’ll start and this list is not exhaustive:

Patricia Ann Mahan Lovell
Dixie Malone
Sarah Ellene Mahan
Rebecca Ann Mahan
Barbara Hunter Mahan
Erika Ann Moutaw Wynne
Jill Caroline Wynne
Karen Christine Wynne
Pamela Brown
Kelly Brown
Jessica Lynne Moutaw
Jean Hoverman
Laura Foster Giannini
Doris Glossop
Vera Glossop Ferdinand
Beth Ruble
Patricia Stiles
Barbara Howie
Gwyneth Ashley
Vivian Schad
Kathleen “Danae” Den-Bachlet
Beth Burleigh Bullard
Dale Den
Alla Raykin-Logan
Jody Briles
Jena Kelly
Bev Long
Charlotte Larue
Jeri Pushkin
Karla Shircliff
Kellie Shircliff
Stephanie Redman Smith
Becky Atkins
Nicci Manning
Felicity Harper
Kasia Poplowska
Elizabeth Berry
Jill Shalvis
Carly Phillips
Emily Sylvan-Kim
Natasha Tomic
Vilma Gonzalez
Donna Soluri
Jillian Stein
Kylie Scott
Jennifer Armentrout
Joanna Wylde
Rebecca Zanetti
MJ Rose