Please explain “proverbial shoe” in this passage:

My father died when I was four and my grandfather died six months later. Phone calls in the middle of the night always meant someone was sick, dying, or dead. Maybe because of this I am always expecting the worst or for the proverbial shoe to drop.

My comments:

The other proverbial shoe, that is.

The full expression is: waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In our example, proverbial means it’s not to be taken literally.

Taken literally, “waiting for the other shoe to drop” describes a supposedly commonplace experience of the old days, when people were crowded in department houses that were not well insulated for sound, to say the least.

Certainly I’ve heard of a version of this waiting-for-the-other-shoe story. It goes, roughly, as follows:

A young clerk who always comes back home from late, around midnight, has a habit of throwing his boots hard down on the floor before he climbs into bed. Exhausted from work, the clerk then goes right into slumber. But the sound of the two heavy boots dropping on the floor gets on the nerves of an old man living in a room right below. To the nervous old man, the two shoes dropping sound no less than two bomb shots. Boom! Boom!

The long and short of it is, it comes to a point that every night, the old man lies in bed wide awake waiting for the young man to drop both of his shoes before he can try to get some sleep, if any.

This night, however, the second booming noise never came.

As it turns out, that night, the young man is about to drop his second shoe before he suddenly comes to his senses, realizing that the noise he make may be too much for his neighbors. Ergo, he proceeds to put the second shoe ever so gently on the floor, without causing, like, a whisper.

Early the next morning, barely at dawn break and way before sunup, the young man is awakened by loud knocking noises from the door. It is the old man from downstairs. When the young man opens the door, the old man asks, rather angrily: “What went wrong? What happened to you last night?

“Every night, I hear two sounds but last night I heard one sound and never the second. In waiting for the other shoe to drop, I never had a wink!”

Well, that’s what I used to hear regarding the story about the other shoe. I’ve heard different versions but they are all the same, people wait for the other shoe to drop. Presumably they have to wait for the other shoe to drop before they can get on with their lives. And the other shoe, the other shoe to drop, or the proverbial shoe, or the other proverbial shoe becomes synonymous with something that’s inevitable to happen.

Something bad, especially.

All right, let’s read a few more media examples to hammer the point firmly home:

1. Back in 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down all state laws against homosexuality, Justice Kennedy also wrote the majority opinion. That opinion, in the case Lawrence v. Texas, set the stage for today’s majority opinion authored by the same justice. In 2003, Justice Kennedy argued that laws restricting homosexual acts and relationships were driven by moral animus against homosexuals and homosexuality. He acknowledged that this moral judgment is both venerable and deeply rooted in the moral traditions of Western civilization, but he condemned such laws and, writing for the majority, struck them down. He employed the very same logic today in striking down DOMA.

Back in 2003, Justice Antonin Scalia issued a scathing dissent to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion: “Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples?”

Justice Kennedy insisted in 2003 that the Lawrence decision did not involve homosexual marriage and did not imply any necessary recognition of same-sex unions. In response, Scalia retorted: “This case ‘does not involve’ the issue of same-sex marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.” He concluded: “Many will hope that, as this Court comfortingly assures us, this is so.”

As Justice Kennedy himself made abundantly clear today, Justice Scalia was right ten years ago. Justice Kennedy’s protestations that the Lawrence decision did not involve same-sex marriage were wrong. It is hard to avoid the moral conclusion that he was then both intellectually dishonest and disingenuous. The decision handed down today proves Justice Scalia to have been a prophet. He told the truth, and Justice Kennedy, in his own words, has proved Scalia to have been right.