Disappointing Shoes

            I’m a little disappointed with my current pair of sneakers. But, please don’t tell them. They can’t help it. It’s not their fault.

            I’ve had them for four months, and they’re now cracked in places, and have gained a kind of melancholic patina like congressional representatives get after their first year in office. They’ve also worn out quickly. Perhaps I’ve just been working in them more lately. Heck, they may have just aged the same as any other pair of cheap sneakers I’ve had.

            They’re white, and I wipe them down sometimes, since they get so dusty. Of course, they have scuffs. In such a short time, the soles have smushed down, and I can see little ridges popping out where the material’s compacting. I didn’t provide a photograph of them with this piece. I’ll spare you that.

            The shoes cost ten dollars. When I buy ‘bopping around’ shoes, I consider the chance that I might see a pair that would make me pay as much as fifteen or twenty-five dollars, but I usually wind up settling on the cheapest. Sometimes I buy the exact same model, or simply choose the same design with a different color. And, then, people notice that I’ve gotten a new pair, and tell me that they’re nice! I mean it! I even got it on the street one time. I think the compliments are from politeness, yes, but also from a marketing dynamic gone hay-wire. No one else would be caught dead in ten-dollar shoes, so few people buy them, and, perhaps, they look like something new from most people’s perspective.

            The cheap shoes I have have enough support for me. I’ve been blessed with good feet. I wear those ol’ disposable shoes until they’re falling off. It’s miserliness on my part, but it’s also the principle of the thing.

            There is another benefit to ten-dollar shoes, though. As we all know, when you’re walking, you’re lifting the weight of the shoe with every step, and that adds up. My ten dollar shoes are an asset, because over the months, the rubber sluffs off. It was a red-letter date when I realized that my shoes were an ounce lighter, but still provided support!

            Support Slippers! This would usually be the point where I go off on a tangent about something that I invented, complete with marketing strategy and advertising ditty, but I need to stick to the rant, dammit! Not only that, Support Slippers have probably been invented already. They’re probably out there somewhere. I just don’t get out much.

            This footwear wear strategy served me best when I worked in a shop a while back. The mission of that large company happens to be the pursuit of theocracy, which I’m against. But all companies have their ‘missions’. Most whittle down to something like Santa Claus bestowing widgets on everyone. Profit is seldom mentioned. (It might be implied…) When they force me to read a mission statement of companies I work for, I wind up queasy for the duration.

            During the ‘Great Recession’, you see, I was one of eleven hundred who applied to be part of a temporary crew at that particular shop. I was hired as a part of a group of one hundred, and then fifty from that group were hired permanently. As I worked there through desperate necessity, many of the other workers had the same motivation, and we functioned well, despite the heavier-than-most corporate manipulation there.

            I kept the shoes clean, and they lasted well for a few months, becoming those afore-mentioned support slippers. I would, at times, sprint around in them toward the end of a shift.

            Anyway, the process repeated itself a few times over the course of three and a third years, and I went through five pairs of shoes that way.

            I left at just the right time- October of 2016. I’ll keep my comments on the atmosphere of that shop and the impact of the company culture brief, but, combined with the news outside, I was starting to hear MAGA in stereo.

            My current shoes are disappointing also because with the left shoe of this current pair, grit and leaf shards seem to make their way in with more regularity! It may be through some anomalous grit vortex it has. But how this happens with any pair of shoes I wear, I don’t understand. I thought that’s what pant cuffs were for! Keeping grit from getting in through the top of the shoe. I’m quite sensitive to things coming to rest in my shoes. Once I was visiting my sister, and we were chatting out on the patio. As we did, I scowled and reached down, took off my shoe, and knocked a bit of something out of it. My sister was watching me, curious as to what would warrant this sortie. I showed her the culprit, which could be described as a largish grain of sand. Hey! Perhaps there could be a device to prevent grit from getting into shoes, like polarized cuff-rings for the tactile-defensive!

            Nope! Nope. I won’t go into that right now. I’m more passionate about complaining than with any potential solutions.     

            Must…stick to…rant…

            What my relationship with my shoes comes down to is what my relationship with all my things comes down to. It’s nothing very mystical, and not much of an obsession, but objects seem to have a kind of life to me. This is my condition. Material doesn’t want to be wasted. But my attitude also comes from something drilled into me through school and Ad Council television and radio ads when I was young.  It was less of the old ‘waste not, want not’ adage, and more pop culture. A kind of Saturday morning public service ad conscientiousness, served up along with story-lines where anything could come to life.

            Inanimate objects have such a life for me- not too much- but enough that I use toys to remind me of things. I have a flamingo beany-baby, for example, that I move from place to place from the electric outlet to in front of a big tube television that I use to watch DVDs. He reminds me whether that large TV is plugged in or not. I keep that big old TV unplugged most of the time, since sometimes, when it’s off, it hums inexplicably. And that’s kinda scary.

             So, I can’t bring myself to throw shoes, televisions, or, for that matter, anything away. There’s a miserliness to it, and the principle of using something until it can’t possibly be used anymore. I have all my shoes in a row. The shoes I’m disappointed in are in the ‘third string’. They’re my ‘bopping around shoes’. When I want to be more presentable, I wear a sturdier pair that promises to last a very long time. For best, I have a pair of wing tips that I haven’t worn in fifteen years.

            Hold on…

            …I’m sorry. There was someone at the door. What with his get-up, all I could really see of him was his face, and it was one that looked like he was having a bad day of many. He wore a long, tattered, hooded cloak, but the cloak wasn’t long enough to cover the fact that beneath it he sported a pair of sparkly-hologramatic high-top mauve-finish Fish Head Wheelies, with slip-on heels, and Bluetooth capability. He brought a small bag of chocolate coins, and with it, a commission of an elegiac poem for a particular pair of shoes. Of course, my position is such that I had to take the work. He told me to hurry. That there’s not much time. I’m sure the reader will agree.

            Pity not past footwear,

            which lieth in the dump.

            Leather, rubber, string.

            For they have served their purpose.

            Stalwart sheath of feet

            Protector of toenails. 

            Though weathered,

            faultless, these sneakers are.

            Never raging against the fortune

            of their birth, nor demurring

            from steadfast pads.

            Not once they squeaked.

            Or scuffed, marring

            waxen slab.

            Let us witness still,

            the life we can observe

            through these, now, artifacts

            who served.

            And be kinder to the ones we wear.