Shoe

one shoe

Shoes on a phone wire are one thing, you know, usually a pair of tennis shoes tied together and thrown over a phone wire. I notice them one day hanging there all droopy and I wonder what that story was. Bullies attacking the class whimp who carried all his gym stuff tightly wrapped inside his gym towel with the tennis shoes hung round the outside of the whole thing. The bullies grabbed the towel mercilessly pulled off the shoes and rolled the towel in one giant motion: tee shirt, trunks and jock flying to the wind. The panicked wimp tries vainly to recover the white cotton garments lost to the wind. The bully is now swinging the shoes over his head and launches the connected shoes, the centrifugal force pulls the shoes apart straining against each other till the center knot hits the telephone securing shoes securely onto the wire for the next year probably long. Yes, I know how the shoes got there what the better question is what happened to the pair of shoes? One day I am passing the monument and realize the shoes are no longer hanging there. I don’t know how long they have been gone they are just gone. Mystery. I wonder if the City has a special crew with a ladder truck which come round a couple times a year and “harvest” the shoes. What do these folks do with these “shoes of disgrace?” Or, maybe, there is a county road crew or a prison trusty program which goes round the state in orange jumpsuits and black plastic bags in which theuy stick the shoes after they send the smallest member of the crew usually named “Bug” out on the wire to cut the shoes free.

No. The hanging shoes or the disappearing shoes is not what intrigues me. What intrigues me is the one shoe sitting on the side of the road or in the road for that matter. I see this with gloves too but mostly shoes. What has happened to the other shoe? Is the mate of this wayward shoe work hard on one leg of an amputee—a person who needed but one shoe and discarded the other. The shoe I come across never new. Their old, beaten, used sometimes abused. I wonder sometimes, darkly, if the show is the result of a horrible vehicular accident. Person struck with such momentum that the shoe is hurled from the body, flies and comes to rest along the side of the road. The shoes stay there for weeks sometimes months but usually disappears one day when I notice all the other debris and junk is gone—one of those street sweeping machines has run down 3rd west and scoured the side of the road as best it can, a clean sweep. I wonder, sometimes, if I am ever hit by a car when I am going to work will my shoes fly off my feet before I come to a rest with “X”s on my eyes? If I ponder this too long I start getting nervous then scared the I “hug” the side of the road, as close to the wall as I can get glancing down at my feet to see how well the shoes are tied.