Why Did the Shoe Hit the Road?

From my days as a facilitator / camp counselor. Another score for my photo app’s search feature.

The last one I saw was a work boot sitting at an angle just off the curb, like it was poised to jaywalk. Joe camel tan, it was the kind of boot that holds its shape even without the shape of a man who makes his living with his muscles and has nerves like its toe. It looked cared for, the way my ex, many exes back, would his. He’d set them scuffed clean by the front door next to the lunch I would pack him. I was trying on the slippers of a woman who poured love into thick slices of cheese and turkey on fat hunks of bread slathered with Dijon, cold lemon apple crisp, and the occasional heart-shaped note in an old-timey pail. In a crowd, he’d press his husky whisper into my ear, saying he’d loved smelling me on him while he worked. Yes, the blood coursing through my veins and my shallow breaths would tell me, this could fit.

I kept seeing them, these single shoes on the side of the road. For weeks now, they’d been nodding at me. There’d been the water shoe hugging the lane line near an outlet mall up north, small, probably a child’s. Its Smurf blue stripe hadn’t yet given way to the lapping of chlorine and white-yellow rays. A canvas Ked, squash orange, no laces, tongue lazy had sprawled way off the road beneath brush painted lime by low afternoon rays in an industrial district.

Today’s was flat, black leather, the kind you'd want to waitress in. Miles added up in loops had widened and misshapen it. It was on its side, the gaping maw you’d push a foot into facing me. I was glad when the light turned.

How is this happening so often? I asked myself as I drove on, hurrying to meet my sister. Who were these people whose shoes went missing? What were they like, those moments of discovery, one foot naked?

I arrived at my sister’s, still in my comfy boots.

“You ready?” she called.

The day was warming up. “Yeah, let me just change shoes real quick.” I reached underneath my driver’s seat where my favorite sandals live (many spaces become drawers when you live in a van), grabbed a sandal, slipped my foot into it, and reached back again.

Aw, I thought, empty-handed, well then.

I imagined that solitary beige sandal with a cushiony sole joining the others that had gone rogue. Oh, the stories she could share. One time, she’d been nearly engulfed by a former lake bed outside Joshua Tree National Park. The silty, crumbly soil come clay inside the shower tent had sucked her in, clinging to her. Outside the window flap, the sun lavished on the Transverse Ranges its slow, silvery golden nightly caress in preparation for sinking into that copper mountain, and four-wheelers took dizzying loops, whipping silt to dazzle in its low, elongated rays. She’d been pried loose, washed, and laid out to dry on the dusty dashboard.

Then there’d been the time she’d slipped from the top of an inflatable kayak into a glacial-melt lake in the heart of Alaska that smelled of the endless pines that circled it and glistened like beryl. She’d been snatched back just before slipping into depths she’d never know.

After getting wet, she’d get pride of place on the dashboard, drying in the rays streaming through the glass while countless roads stretched out like wide charcoal ribbons before her.

Laughing, I told my sister to hold on and climbed into the belly of Ruby (my van) to make a new shoe selection. “I'll have to get another pair,” I said, tossing the one who’d stayed back under the seat (just in case) and wondering out loud if my having noticed the others on the highways had given my sandal the idea to jump ship.

The next day, I got a text from my sister with just a meme.