Just recently, I was forced to retire a pair of shoes that were my loyal and steadfast friends for the last three years. These were formative times, my early twenties, and the shoes accompanied me through various stages and places in my wayward journeys.
We met at the Lady Footlocker on Broadway in New York. It was the summer of 2007 and the cold air of the store provided a greatly needed respite from the sticky humidity of the outdoors, awash with throngs of tourists walking at a frustrating pace and the smell of honey roasted peanuts riding wafts of exhaust from yellow cabs. Shopping malls have Cinnabon; New York has Nuts 4 Nuts.
They were low top, white shoe laced Converse: a treated leather that appeared gold to some people and silver to others. I preferred to see them as silver, as gold seemed to me to be a little gauche for my liking. I tried them on. A size 9, even though I am technically a size 10. The deflationary sizing made me feel better about myself and my giant feet, thus making me more likely to purchase these delightful shoes. Success.
Whitney weighed in, saying that she liked them. Her friend Paloma, who I did not yet know well enough to respect or reject her opinion, also said that she liked them. A few more foot turns in the ground-floor mirror and I was off to the cash register to invest in the next three years of my life.
That summer those shoes went everywhere with me. Bike rides over the bridge into Brooklyn, dance parties in bars that looked like the basements of shitty hunting cabins, more dance parties in lofts across from people I used to love. These shoes were magical because their nondescript metallic shade went with everything and then again went with nothing. It was the sartorial equivalent of beige.
Soon enough the summer expired and I moved back to Los Angeles to make money and live the easy life, adding cash to my bank account and voluntarily subtracting fun and adventure from my life. The shoes came with me, crying about how I would never use them in a city where no one ever walked. Sure, I would make a few random trips to San Francisco and work some good wear and tear into their soles, but by and large my Converse would regrettably morph into something akin to a 4×4 Range Rover in metropolis – marvelous in craftsmanship and styling, but starved of opportunities to live up to its capabilities.
To relieve my shoes from the humdrum malaise of Hollywood, I took them on a trip to Paris with me. I wore them on the plane, next to a French man who tried to articulate in poor English that I would really love France. It is possible he was flirting with me, but I was too busy staring out at the city awaiting me outside of my window to notice.
We went to the catacombs, Versailles, the d’Orsay. The Louvre did not impress either of us. Every day we would walk and walk and on the days in which I woke up late, which were many, my shoes were mad at me for wasting precious opportunities to see the sights.
Two years later, me and my shoes went to London. They were very excited when I managed to swindle my way into a first class ticket. It was an overnight flight and after eating my little pieces of parmesan cheese, my warm mixed nuts, the two glasses of syrupy white wine, I tucked my shoes away and propped my socked feet up on the bed that I would be sleeping on until we were on the other side of the world.
London was much more work than Paris was for the both of us. We got lost often, wandering around in circles for hours and watching the clock arms swing around alarmingly fast while the tube took us from central London to the outskirts of Notting Hill.
The pavement there was gray and most often wet. My shoes, looking more worse for the wear since their last time abroad, walked the streets beautifully. Perfectly worn in to accompany my every strange bump and curve, splitting at the seams where my feet told them to. These were my shoes.
This is why when I realized that it was time to put them down, I became very sad. The most visceral and self-actualizing moments in my life thus far had taken place while wearing these shoes – these silly pieces of rubber and leather, of stitching and labels, my Made in China but Worn Everywhere shoes. I had never been so attached to an inanimate object. In fact, when I retired them I felt like I was euthanizing a childhood dog.
And like dogs, when I went to the Converse store to pick out the shoes that would presumably be with me for the next three years, I felt like I was betraying my old silver standbys. I was still wearing them as I inspected the varying shades and different canvas offerings of the new styles. When I put them on my feet, they fit strangely and too tight in the areas that my old shoes had graciously given up on.
I stood in the mirror, one foot on my future and the other on my past. The future looked clean and bright, more up to date and fashionably relevant. The past was grimy and busted, shoe laces now an embarrassing and soiled gray. They had somehow managed to transform from a shoe into a testament of personal growth, of moving ahead, of my own little life.
That day I purchased two pairs: a high top black and white tweed and a low top gray canvas. When I returned home I took off my old shoes, placed them on the tile of my mother’s foyer and stared at them for a moment. They looked like hell. They were precisely in the shape of my foot, which is not how a foot should be shaped. Against the clean white surface of the floor, they looked like I had stolen them from a homeless person or a twelve-year-old boy who skateboarded after school instead of doing his homework. I knew I should have thrown them away, that they were just shoes and nothing more than that, but when I opened the door to make my way to the trashcan I stopped myself. I turned around and went back inside, into the bedroom that was mine during my teenage years, and placed my weathered old shoes in the closet, where they will sit until I realize that I am a silly person obsessed with nostalgia and the trappings of my own past.
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