The Big Cons

It's Not Easy Being Green
Originally uploaded by Laura.

Imagine my delight and surprise — these resplendent turquoise Chucks on the sale rack in a Massachusetts discount store. Arms heaving with a purse, a pair of jeans, another pair of shoes, and three sweaters, I didn’t have enough wiggle room to try them on so I hauled them up by their tongues after a cursory glance at the size and bought them.

Apparently that glance was a little too cursory. It wasn’t until I was back in New York and headed out for a thrilling sojourn to the bank and the laundromat (the inevitable domain of urban-dwelling Converse sneakers, besides the bar) when I realized. As I sat lacing them in the watery January light of my messy kitchen, I found myself saying out loud, “Wow. These look really big.” I slid one on my foot and it flopped around crazily, inches too big in every direction. I was indeed a size 7, but I was not a man.

After the disappointment subsided, I wondered what could have put them on the sale rack in the first place. After all, you don’t see absurdly discounted Chucks every day — hence my initial enthusiasm over them. I realized that it must be the color, that even in 2007 it takes a bold sort to wear turquoise on his feet, especially in the prickly gray suburbs of northeastern Massachusetts. In New York, it would have been different. Hipsters, Chelsea boys, girls who don't mind stuffing, artists and crafty folk with hankerings for a new flower pot — those sneakers would not have been long for the discount rack. Or maybe they would have.

In Ellen Meloy’s The Anthropology of Turquoise, she riffs on the color as it appears in nature, in deserts, oceans and sky, and details its power as a talisman, a currency, an ink dye. Neither green nor blue, it changes according to air and water and skin. It adapts. And maybe, too, it is not quite ready for everyday use. Perhaps to wear turquoise so lightly is to announce yourself a little too boldly to the world, to be — regardless of gender or status — a little bit silly at the outset. Funny how it took nature to stop me, to remind me that my eyes were bigger than my feet.

Butterflies Are Free

Sick Day Shoes
Originally uploaded by Laura.

On sick days, there is nothing like these slippers, which I got for $8 at Pearl River Market when I first moved to New York City. They are not sturdy or comfortable and they stain if you look at them wrong, but in them I have cooked and cleaned and dusted and gotten the mail. They ventured to the bank only once before I deemed them entirely un-road-worthy and thus they became indoor shoes, like a cat that’ll get lost if it’s allowed to venture outside the apartment.

They are the only shoes in my closet that have this exalted status, that are too delicate for the elements and hard sidewalks. As if the butterflies couldn’t have told you that in first place.

Down There on the Ground

In a world where there is Carrie Bradshaw on DVD, Manolo Blahnik, endless coffee table books, Harper’s Bazaar, those strange Hallmark Store collectible sculptures, and thirteen-year-olds everywhere in Coach logo sandals, there is precious little room for a blog about shoes.

So, before I start mine, I will make you some promises.

I will not go on too much about their symbolic allure or tell you how women use them as mate snares, altitude adjusters, status cues, or weapons. And I will certainly not tell you which ones to buy.

What I have to share, on the other hand, is a story, one born in the depths of my own messy closet and continued on the sidewalks and in the office cubicles in a city that is obsessed, in one way or another, with shoes. In New York City, shoes are not just protection from whatever nastiness is spawning on the sidewalk or the things that keep you from being tossed from your favorite restaurant. Here, first and foremost, shoes are transportation. They are the things that get you there, that mark the rhythm of city pace, that are the ground level forced-air heat and air conditioning and support through the jungle of an American city.

For the story of your life, the everyday and the extraordinary, don’t just look back or ahead. Look down.