Note: Hathaway Shoe has closed its Waldo Store. Its other location, in Leawood, Kansas, is J. Hathaway Shoe Boutique.  I haven’t been there, but many of the brands are the same.)

I had planned to inform you that Bob Jones Shoes was the most dangerous place in the universe, but now I’ve decided it’s Hathaway Shoe.

Located at 1914 Grand Avenue of the Americas, north of Crown Center,has been around quite a while because I remember shopping there in 1986, when I worked at the UMKC Dental School. Bob (or Jones?) sells Dansko and Sanita and Italian-made shoes with leather soles, as well as Maruca purses, which are made in Boulder. Here’s a sample of the wares (in which I unfortunately decided to focus on the center instead of on the shoes. Sorry).

But it was at Hathaway, on Wornall a block north of 75th,  that I laid down the money. Remember the days when clerks at shoe stores measured your feet and put them on you? And even used a shoehorn? I can. And on Wednesday I had that experience again, with a clerk named Gregory.

He must have looked through every section of the back room, and produced one beautiful shoe after another. If I had bought every pair of shoes that fit well, I would have had to win the lottery to pay for them.

I have never tried on so many pairs of shoes in my life: at least 20. Finally I told him I was overloading on shoes, and even then he brought out another pair. I found a pair of multicolored boots to go with my dark brown wool pants, and then I bought a pair of green suede shoes just because I’d never seen anything quite like them before.

All this happened at their “comfortable shoes” store, the one that sells shoes you can wear 3 to 5 hours, according to the British guy who called me “lovey.” Hathaway is opening a “fashion shoes” store, featuring shoes you can wear 2 hours or less. I’m not sure what people who want to wear the shoes longer are supposed to do.

The Sweet Guy closed some time in the spring or summer of 2010.

I’ve been reading a book about peri-menopause, and it claims that taking magnesium will decrease chocolate cravings. I may try that, because if I keep going to chocolatiers the way I’ve been going to the Sweet Guy, I may go bankrupt.

I’ve been there 3 times, for a total of 8 truffles (mint and cinnamon-infused white chocolate here)and 2 gelato flavors (the lemon curd had a lovely subtle flavor, like a mild lemon cake). All are made in-house, and sometimes the chocolatier’s sons help.

Originally located in Parkville, the Sweet Guy has made more money in its few months at its Waldo location than it used to make in a year. And I’m helping.

Across Wornall from the Sweet Guy is a homey little coffeehouse called One More Cup. It has a compost bin, and the barista was discussing local farms—my kind of place.Waldo Coffeehouse used to be in that location but closed a couple of years ago. It was at One More Cup that I decided Kansas City coffeehouses are more innovative than those in Denver. (Remember the rosemary caramel latte at LatteLand?) I had the Curious George, a drink mixing espresso, Shatto chocolate milk, and Shatto banana milk (Shatto is a local dairy farm, like Longmont Dairy in the Denver area). No one flavor dominated, and it was really easy to drink.

So far I’m more impressed with the “dessert” shops in Waldo than the actual restaurants. Bars and grills dominate: Waldo Bar and Grill, Tanner’s, the Well, Kennedy’s. I thought college students might be supporting those establishments, but when my sister and I ate dinner at the Well on Tuesday, the crowd was all ages. When we first arrived, I went up to the deck to see if were could eat up there, but it was too cold (the picture here is from Monday night). We slid into a booth inside, where I was able to watch tennis over my sister’s head, and she could watch baseball. It was pretty busy for early in the week, and the music was loud. We talked about my plans for a location independent future. I got the impression she thought I was about to leave Todd and start gallivanting around the globe, which is not exactly what I had in mind.

Both of us ordered salads, and I asked the waitress which tequilas they had. When she came back from the bar with a list, I told her I wanted Patron añejo. “Patron and Jaeger?” she asked. After a few more exchanges like that, I wrote it down, and then I had to explain what it meant. Then I had to explain it to my sister, but she doesn’t drink. What’s more, the waitress made it clear she didn’t care that she didn’t know.

Our salads arrived, huge and chopped and tasty. Mine was the tequila-lime salad, with smoked salmon on top that wasn’t all that smoky, black beans, corn, etc. My sister’s Broadway salad had cranberries and blue cheese and nuts, I think; I can’t read the menu on Urbanspoon.

After dinner, however, we both had a bit of indigestion. Luckily for me, the gelato at the Sweet Guy cured it. The Well is only a few months old, so I think with time it will improve. The menu is moving in the direction of a gastropub, though it’s not as interesting as Jonesy’s EatBar in Uptown Denver.

Monday I had lunch at Waldo Pizza (on the left), which my sister remembered fondly for its desserts. I saw a T-shirt on the wall that read, “Staff so friendly you’ll think they’re faking it,” but my server obviously hadn’t read it. I left her a dollar tip and felt that might be too generous.

The thin-crust pizza, however, was great. I liked the sausage pizza and the bacon pizza and the pepperoni and sausage. I tried a dessert concoction on thin-crust pizza that reminded me of an apple danish drizzled with cream.

So far, the theme in Kansas City seems to be “pork and sweets.” Does it have anything to do with the American Royal starting this Sunday? I don’t know.

Two stores, only about a mile apart in Waldo, that many people would lump into the same category. Yet they’re different.

Eclectics, located north of Gregory on Oak in Kansas City, is an artists cooperative. The day I was there, Susan Speck told me about some of the artists whose works fill the store. Susan, as a member, works at the store; other artists are “consigners.” You can find her “handbuilt, funk-tional porcelain” at the link above.

One of the first things I noticed in the store (besides the guard puppy) were these repurposed Barbies, dubbed the “Spice Girls,” and created by Beverly Mangham. It would be fun to decorate your kitchen with them.

At the back I found these “soft sculpture fantasy” angels by Susanne, a.k.a. Susi F. Coatta. But my favorite was this group of creatures made from gourds by Jennifer Throne.

Fabú also has a small but affectionate guard dog, as well as a formerly feral guard cat named Blinkers, who rubbed my calves and looked up at me with his glass-green eyes and then stretched out his claws and applied them to the flesh above my knees. So I petted him.

I spent a while listening to the owner talk about the difficulties of running a store in this recession, now that her husband has retired and her partner bought the Waldo Bar and Grill. She’s planning on selling off the merchandise beginning in February and closing the store sometime after that. So get on over to Fabú now for cute baby clothes and these jean jackets with knitted sleeves and silver charms the owners collected over the years. I bought my sister a set of Lucite salt-and-pepper shakers from the vintage collection in the store.

The owner’s daughter, Elle, made the necklace and bracelets shown here.

I could have stayed and talked for hours. Apparently people are always coming by and saying, “I used to live in this house,” among them Kate Spade, who grew up in Kansas City.

On the owner’s recommendation, I went to Waldo Pizza for lunch. I’ll talk about that in a later post.

Until the summer of my eleventh birthday, in 1973, I lived in a house near 70th and Holmes in Kansas City. That neighborhood is called Waldo, and I’ve been hanging out there the last two days.

Waldo’s center is 75th and Wornall, so our old house is perhaps a mile away. I try to drive by it every time I visit, but I didn’t take a picture because bushes and one of those huge Kansas City trees obscure the front. I wonder if the current owners covered up the “Jesus Loves You” and “The Beatles” signs that my sisters painted on our bedroom wall? Or could they still be concealed by the 36-year-old wallpaper my father put up right before we moved?

When I planned this trip I thought I would start in central Kansas City and move north, but I forgot about Waldo and started in Brookside, which is at 63rd and Wornall.

I really like this neighborhood. It’s at least 100 years old, having been annexed to Kansas City in 1909, and in my opinion it’s the last urban neighborhood before the strip malls take over in south Kansas City. I’m writing this post in the Sweet Shop, a couple of doors down from Kokoro Maki House where I had edamame and a New York roll for lunch.

To give you an idea of the scale of Kansas City, let me explain that 75th Street is about 150 blocks south of downtown (each number has a street and a terrace). If I were to superimpose a map of Kansas City on a map of Denver, with the downtowns overlapping and south KC pointing north of Denver (where I live), I would guess this area is roughly comparable to, say, Highway 7 (Baseline and Arapahoe) where it runs through Lafayette. The second house I lived in, near Wornall and Red Bridge Road, is in the 110th block. I’m not even sure where 220 blocks would be north of Denver. Longmont? Niwot? So when I was growing up, downtown was a rumor where my father had his law office, and I seldom went there.

Another thing I noticed in this neighborhood: “South Side” signs. In the 1930s, when my father was a boy, his father was a minor political boss for the South Side Democrats. That was the Prendergast era, but my grandfather worked for a rival politico named Shannon. In those days, the South Side was the white neighborhood and African Americans lived farther north (for example, around 18th and Vine). My father lived near Troost, a north-south street that today is the dividing line between white and black neighborhoods.

I don’t remember my paternal grandfather, who died when I was five. He was notorious for having run off with another woman while still married to my grandmother. Because of his political connections and because he took “mortgaged property” (a ring) across state lines, he was arrested and dragged back. The story made the paper, and I have been told that my grandmother learned of his bigamy that way. Whether that’s true or not, that abandonment certainly shaped my father’s life, and the lives of his siblings.

I was driving around in Kansas today, just west of State Line Road, and meditating on the vast distances in Kansas City. I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, but I know now I’m just not cut out for suburban life. Especially in a town with all these huge houses on even bigger lots on street after street of suburbia.

When I’m not here, I miss my family, and I miss the trees. But really, that’s about it.

Though I do hope to discover some new things to miss on this trip.