His day starts the way each day starts at Mayfair Shoe Repair, with a slow burning of incense. If the incense doesn't defeat the sharp smell of cobbler's glue in the shop, it at least disguises it.
Ricardo Henriquez works Monday to Saturday, six days a week, about six hours a day, sometimes longer depending on the season.
During hockey season, patching and stitching the worn-out hockey gloves, the work is sometimes more than he can shake a stick at.
"I'm here until 10, 11 at night," he said.
His shop is down the street from Christie's Mayfair Bakery, sandwiched between a coffee house and a Thai restaurant.
While not always at this location, and run in the past by other owners, there's been a shoe repair shop along this stretch of 33rd Street for ages.
Ricardo's father, Jose, opened the shop in the early '90s, a couple of years after getting into the business with Ideal Shoe Renue on 20th Street.
The Henriquez family is from El Salvador.
Jose, a son of a tailor, spirited his wife, Isabel, and their four children -- Cecilia, Claudia, Monica and Ricardo -- out of the country during its civil war in 1981.
"We left when I was 16," says Ricardo, 41. "I had to leave behind my little dog, all my friends.
We lived for three years in Mexico. I had to leave another dog, my new friends."
From Mexico, the Henriquez family went to Vancouver and North Battleford, eventually settling in Saskatoon.
Jose, an accountant by trade but longing to be his own boss, enrolled in a shoe repair course offered by Regina's Wascana Institute through a satellite school in Esterhazy. His framed diploma hangs on a wall at the back of the repair shop where there's a small couch and a television and a portable sound system that plays Latin music throughout the day while Ricardo goes about business.
The shop is narrow, busy.
Big, old sewing machines which look like extras from a Western Development Museum casting call compete for space with industrial strength hole punchers. Hand tools and tins of shoe polish and squares of leather patches spill across the counter as if shaken from the shelves, a 4.5 on the Richter Scale.
Forty years ago it seemed there was a shoe repair shop in every commercial part of the city, on Broadway and Cumberland, on Lorne and downtown. Saskatoon had 12 shoe repair joints in 1969, today there are six.
Last Monday, Ricardo was out of his shop for a few minutes in the afternoon, helping a woman push her truck out of the snow in a nearby lot.
When he got back to the shop, two men were standing at the front counter, one of them holding a hockey glove which was worn through at the palm.
Ricardo gave the glove the once over. He told them he'd cut a circle of leather and patch it.
No sweat, he said.
"Thanks, Ricardo," one of the men said.
"We've got to have it Wednesday," the other one said.
Ricardo said he sees those two all the time. They're from the Goal Crease shop, just up the street on 33rd.
"I've known some of my customers more than 10 years," Ricardo said.
"To have people coming back, knowing they trust me and are happy with the quality of the work, that's satisfying.
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