new shoes

Unlike my husband, my daughter and Imelda Marcos, I never give footwear a second thought. I can go into a store, pick out a pair of shoes and leave in under 15 minutes. This is a fact. This is all the attention I figure shoes are worth. Nobody looks at my feet anyway.

At any given time I own 5 pairs-sandals, riding boots, dress flats, everyday walkers and slippers. All of them are black. Black goes with everything.

This morning I was stumbling around for about 45 minutes before I remembered I'd left my everyday shoes out on the porch the night before. I'd been gardening and at some point during the proceedings I'd stepped in some dog crap, so I figured I'd leave them out overnight, let them get rained on and then finish washing them off under the hose the next morning.

But it was still raining. Furthermore the shoes had been blown over and were both brimfull of water.
'Wear another pair' said the Biker sensibly.
"Where are they?" I asked.
The Biker dug out my riding Docs and my dress flats. Both were coated in dust. "I put them on the shelf in my closet so I'd remember where they were" he explained, which makes perfect sense if you're married to me.
The Docs and the dress flats wouldn't do.
" I think I saw another pair out in the truck," he said, and off he went. Thank God one of us has a functioning brain.

I keep a spare set of clothes in my truck at all times, bra, pants, shoes, hat, shirt, everything. Every truck we've ever owned, I've had to do this, because I tend to trash whatever I'm wearing if I'm out on a truckable errand. I seem to end up in the river a lot.

The biker came back in and dropped a pair of white tennis shoes on the floor. They were flattened and moldy. "They've got something on them," he said as I uncurled them and chunks of crud fell out. "What is that; paint?"
I looked.
"Oh, that's blood," I said. "Remember when I fell off the cliff at Larrabee park?"
The Biker sighed.
I had not told him about the time I'd fallen off the cliff at Larrabee park.
There's about a year there where a lot of things happened that I felt it best not to tell him about.

Back when I had first started taking Prozac I was prone to doing thoughtless, spur of the moment things because I no longer got that automatic jolt of dread that a change in brain chemistry used to cause me. See, formerly, that would happen and then I'd have to talk myself into or out of whatever 'X' idea happened to be. Once that jolt stopped happening, I just automatically assumed 'Well! must be a good idea then!" and off I went.

It usually wasn't a good idea.

The time I decided to climb the cliffs at Larrabee park is a case in point. I've never rock-climbed in my life. I'm not a climber. Hell; I'm not an athlete. By any stretch of the imagination whatsoever, am I athletic. No.
And yet, I decided on that afternoon that clambering up the filthy, pointy, muddy rocks surrounding the bay during slack tide was a fine idea. Why? Because I wanted to see what might be growing on them up around the spray line. I had my identification guide in my little backpack.
I had my plastic bags, cuttings knife and damp paper towels in there too.
I had the comically oversized tennis shoes with no tread left on the soles that the Bikers' cousin had given to me when I'd lost my shoes in her pigpen earlier that day.

Yes.
Some three hours prior to this event, swine had eaten my shoes.

I was ready.

When I fell off the cliff and slid shins first down the green, scummy, barnacle- clad rocks, one of these shoes passed me and landed in a tidepool full of rotting dulse. The other shoe had deep furrows cut into it all the way through the sole.

I limped back to shore, took them off, took off my bloody socks, buried them in the sand- which for some reason seemed like a really good idea at the time- and carried the shoes back up to the truck, a distance of about a mile, by which time I'd almost stopped bleeding. I threw the shoes behind the seat and drove home barefoot.

This had happened in 1993.

I bought new shoes today. It took me 10 minutes. They are black.
As soon as I left the store I sat down, took the old scody ones off, put my new shoes on and threw the old ones in the trash.
Then I went home, rinsed the dog crap off my other shoes and set them in the sun to dry.
They still have tread.