Skip to main content

Chapter One: That One Shoe in the Road

Of the different things I have considered, contemplated...ok, spent too much time on, is the one shoe in the road. You've seen them. It. Only one...which is the whole point. Why only one? Where's the other one?? How did that one get there? Did somebody loose a box of clothes...no, it's just one shoe. No socks, no second shoe...nothing else. Just a shoe.

I have seen all sorts of shoes by themselves over the past few years. It might be sensitivity awareness, like when you buy a new car then suddenly you see that model of car everywhere you go. I started noticing shoes by themselves and asking around. Ever since, they're everywhere. I see a new one at least once a week. I started taking pictures, but didn't have a good way to catalog them just yet.

I have heard that a pair of shoes tied together and suspended from a power line is indicative of one of two things; either someone in the area sells drugs, or someone in the area was the subject of hazing. Either way, when you see a pair of shoes hanging over a power line, you think "Oh, that poor kid," or "how did those get there?" But what about that one sneaker on the shoulder...what did you think then? You didn't think about it. One shoe is just debris. Litter. A pair of shoes--oh, what a waste of a good pair of shoes! Poor kid! But wouldn't the kid with only one shoe be just as sad?

I've lost a sock from a pair more than once; the sock monster lives in my laundry room as it does in most households. But I don't have a shoe monster, for the most part.

So when you next see a single shoe in the road, consider it. Maybe take a picture. See if you can figure out how it got there or whether you can reunite it with its partner.

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 20, 2018 at 4:35 PM

    I know where those singles come from...harried mother's trying to keep up with kids and all their belongings. Something inadvertently gets misplaced and on occasion I have been lucky enough to find a single sock still on my running board after a trek to the dentist in the pouring rain and I'm assuming single shoes have found themselves on the running board or back bumper more than a time or two and then lost forever in the middle of the road somewhere.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finding Ragtime

“It’s the water,” I explained. “It draws me.” When a child is born in a port city, the sounds and smells of the ocean environment permeate the existence of the tiny human, perhaps even before birth itself. The sound of waves lapping the shoreline pushing the mix of salt, iodine, and magnesium into the ever-lifting oceanic air become a staple of existence, branding the consciousness with a marker it can never escape. And like juvenile salmon, once marked, the voyage into the world will have a nagging gravity drawing the fry back to its origin, back to its beginning. At least that’s how it was for me. After being born in Port Angeles mere blocks from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I spent my first six weeks breathing the marine air of Port Angeles, Washington while being cared for by a kind nurse who acted as a foster parent.  My parents decided they weren’t ready to be parents again.  They were probably right. My mother was 17 and had already relinquished a child for adoption, so when my f
Post a Comment
Read more

Found

My family tree has an invisible asterisks after the title itself, set there in an attempt to be honest of my faint origins while maintaining the dignity of respect for my adopted family.  I love my family, along with it's regular amount of drama and unsettling factoids.  The complications of explaining the family org chart is already un-simple, complete with half siblings, step parents, missing links and whatnot.  Toss in the adoption fact and watch your audience dwindle quickly while the faithful few try to un-spin their heads.  The entertainment value is certainly there, but usually the conversation simply concludes with the all-too familiar phrase.   "That's crazy!!!" To keep things straight, I wound up creating two family trees: one for my adopted family and another for my birth family.  As of last week, I still had no specific information about my mother other than her full name.  It was as if she had disappeared when she went to Oregon with my father, ne
Post a Comment
Read more

Choosing to Remember

Last night, the call came from the officer. Your dad has been seeing people in his house and in his yard who aren't really there. He hasn't been using his oxygen or taking his medication. He was driving dangerously on the freeway and nearly caused two collisions near his house when he got home. He is being admitted to the hospital for his own protection until you can come. And so, the wheel of life with its numerous cogs of drama graduates to the bigger model to accommodate this new spoke. It's not a tough choice to help your father when he gets old; he brought you through thick and thin when it mattered more than you thought. Now he needs you and doesn't know it. Doesn't want it, either. Since his memory is seriously challenged, I don't know how much longer he will be able to tell me the things I will always want to know. My dad acts independent. He likes to be his own boss; he quit Darigold as a cheese-cutter (no shortage of fun explaining that to my
1 comment
Read more