{"id":528,"date":"2010-02-19T21:20:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T01:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=528"},"modified":"2010-02-19T21:20:59","modified_gmt":"2010-02-20T01:20:59","slug":"on-the-life-of-shoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2010\/02\/19\/on-the-life-of-shoes\/","title":{"rendered":"On the life of shoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"The
The Keds.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These are my shoes. Today, perhaps after the fact of writing a Shakespeare paper into the dawn of the early morning, to the point that the chemical balance in my brain had fallen out of equilibrium, I got eerily close to deciding to wash my sneakers. Keds commandments tell me no, my Mom tells me yes, and my mind is ambivalent. Cleanliness isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t my concern; I recall feeling irrationally yet utterly self conscious the first month \u00e2\u20ac\u201d having them blaringly untarnished and the whites of them leering at me. Once immaculately and uniformly black, replete with a sense of emptiness, their eclectic earthly smears are now landing it somewhere between dinge and dank. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be washing away everything. The shoes have lifted and carried me everywhere in the past eleven months; the past eleven months when life has been jolted with a resemblance of a life well lived.<\/p>\n

I never even meant to buy them; the kind sir I contacted about the job let me know I had been hired and I was to report to work the following morning. I needed black shoes. It was ten o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122clock in the evening. I went to the virtually non-existent clothing department in the 24-hour grocery store.<\/p>\n

My Keds were laced up pretty tightly the first weeks; it saw ten-hour shifts of a dozen happy unions \u00e2\u20ac\u201c wedding cake being the first foreign contaminant it was acquainted with. The precariously tipped over wine glass in the bride\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hand as she danced with her betrothed dribbled champagne into the litter of petals on the wood floor and on to my shoes. These sneakers greeted my first room-mate, saw me through late nights of academic pursuits, escorted me to the nearest coffee vendor, ushered me to house parties, and waded me through streams of cheap beer leaked from kegs. They sat beneath me against the dewy grass during sunrise and while I read string theory on the hill; they forgave me when, during a lapse of poor judgment, I had opted for trying a new short-cut and had sunk them in an alarmingly viscous and inconspicuous pool of mud. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve run through rain puddles dashing water in cinematic glory; the only emission of sound save for the rainfall was the splashing of these sneakers against the concrete, each decibel cutting into the late-night as thunderous as each vein of lightning that shredded the sky. We stood at very front of the concerts we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d go to and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d support the tips of my toes while deafening music pulsed through its fibers, sweat waxed to the floor. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ran with me through the subway system in New York City, hopping over incompliant gates in disgusting weather. They kept their modest dignity when met with the loafers of urban bourgeois. We strode around cities. We spun the sky. On summer days, they flirted with the pavement but settled on the grass; even in times of mundanity, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d comply with my desultory, absentminded ankle-flexing under tables. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something satisfying seeing their soles worn thin, knowing it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s partly due to getting lost in the most enriched and fascinating realms of ideas and potential enlightenment \u00e2\u20ac\u201d glorious libraries and science museums. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve walked my head into a place I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind being and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve helped me wander my mind to living on my own in Ann Arbor.<\/p>\n

We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve stomped out potential forest fires and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve discovered glorious fields through muddy passageways. Each splatter of mud means something; every moment is a spot of dirt, collectively creating an idiosyncratic batch of eccentricities. I remember how they maneuvered me around the puddles and I remember emerging from a narrow path to the field and letting them rest on the table, to get off the ground for a bit.<\/p>\n

We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be together, sockless and laces loose, to sit through exams next week. And we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be together finding our way back to couches inlaid in forests. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be together until we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be together anymore.<\/p>\n

The shoes seem mistakenly too emphasized for a single size eight Keds, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hauntingly not. I ended up hand washing them tonight, and with each layer removed, I made room for another one.<\/p>\n

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are my shoes. Today, perhaps after the fact of writing a Shakespeare paper into the dawn of the early morning, to the point that the chemical balance in my brain had fallen out of equilibrium, I got eerily close to deciding to wash my sneakers. Keds commandments tell me no, my Mom tells me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}