Tiny shoes

The pictures in this entry are accurate but falsified: staged, the next day, for the dizzying visual thrill they provide.

As routines go, it’s a very routine routine. Three days a week, The Boy is at preschool at nine. That leaves The Kid and me with 150 minutes to kill before picking him up. The Kid still wants a nap in the morning if he can grab one, so this becomes my window to do whatever I’m doing – send letters looking for freelance work, or do some freelance work, or sit around worrying about the money I’m not earning from freelance work.

Now, it’s also been a lesson for me in the malleability of humans. I’m sure it illustrates something more interesting than our tendency to form habits, but that’s what I get out of the fact that a twenty-month-old, roused from a nap three times a week at 11:15, will start waking up at 11:14. And generally, that’s what I’ve found. The Kid is out at 9:30, and minutes before I would get up and go through his door, I hear him begin addressing his citizens in his crib. Ba too ridey kin soo pop! Go guy guy GUY go! Then I pop in, he’s all smiles, and we head out the door to do our duty.

I don’t remember why he overslept. Perhaps he was up late the night before. Perhaps he got up at 6am. Perhaps we played until ten instead of 9:30. I only know that at 11:15, I walked away from his door, figuring he’d be up soon enough, and suddenly it was 11:28 [I can’t be the only person with a wormhole in my house – you walk away for two minutes, and it’s TEN minutes later]. So okay, up from the crib, shoes in my hand, coat thrown over you, shelter you out to the car, get the coat off, put the shoes here, strap you in, here’s a sip cup, here are some crackers [Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies, natch], start ‘er up, dial in Paul Harvey or This American Life, and fifteen minutes later we’re picking up The Boy.

And that’s how it always goes, and that’s how it went. School is exactly fifteen minutes’ drive from home, which feels to me like people will think it’s part of why we bought the house. It’s not fourteen minutes, it’s not sixteen, it’s fifteen, which makes me imagine people imagining me, in a series of OCD fits, starting at the preschool, driving exactly fifteen minutes, and then – “Nope. Cornfield. Back to the school to try again.” Until, finally, you end up at an abode that the resident is willing to sell, so that you can be fifteen minutes from your son’s preschool.

We’d made it about thirteen minutes toward home – we were close – when this greeted me:


It gives you a Stupid Moment™. Your brain is putting the strawberries in the mustard, putting things together that it doesn’t expect together. My brain actually guffawed as it said to me: What are the odds, d’you s’pose, that ANOTHER kid’s shoe, that looks just like YOUR kid’s shoe, is there on the SAME rural road that you traversed not THIRTY minutes at which point I looked in the back seat, at The Kid’s stocking-clad footy, and told my brain to shut up. I looked forward just in time [and we were stopped, by this point, as if my car were just a big fat metaphor for my big fat brain, struggling to keep up] to not go get the shoe because of the red Ford pickup that ran it over. Well, I should specify: it didn’t just sail over the shoe; tires flattened the little thing. Both of them.

An aside, triggered by the above picture: are there many sights sadder [I mean, intrinsically, semiotically, sadder] than a little kid’s shoe in the road? There are plenty that are grosser and plenty more outrageous. But one little shoe – a shoe whose name at the Stride Rite, for godsakes, is the Baby Murphy – in the road? That’s sad.

We drove up and down the road very slowly, looking for the other shoe that had surely flown off the roof the same way this one had surely flown off the roof. The same way a spindle of fifty CD-Rs, a year ago, had flown off the roof. It should be one of those Meyers-Briggs [do I have that right, Lauren?] personality test questions: Does your stuff ever fly off the roof? I suspect Lauren would be in the two-thirds of the class that didn’t even understand the question, while my third of the class could only answer by nodding our heads vigorously, rolling eyes and directing our contempt inward.

The roads where I live don’t have gutters. They don’t have curbs, or sidewalks, or lawns. The roads where I live are where the ox-trails between farms have been paved, and they have steep grades on either side so all the rainwater and melting snow will run off the road [where it is not useful] and onto the adjacent farmland [where it is useful]. What else might run down this steep grade? Oh, I don’t know … maybe …[Church Lady voice] BABY SHOES? [/Church Lady voice]

After I picked up the [surprisingly resilient!] Baby Murphy shoe, after it rebounded pluckily from its interaction with the Ford Explorer, we drove oh so s l o w l y up the road, another mile. There was no other shoe. There would be no other shoe. The paved graded ox-trail held only despair.

Of course, it was Wednesday, which meant we all had another date for 1pm, which meant Get Home Microwave Lunch Not Grilled Cheese After All Sorry Kid Up To The Attic Where Are Those Boots Here They Are Two Pair Of Socks And You’re Good To Go Amazon.com New Shoes tomorrow Please Can’t Afford That But What Am I Gonna Not Get Him Shoes? Did You Finish Microwave Lunch? Eat The Rest In The Car and, on the way to the 1pm date, I of course called Her and left the ridiculous message “The Kid is getting a new pair of shoes!” [I only ordered them a half-size up, too. That was the criminal aspect of all this – they still fit him!]

And do you know what She saw in the road when she finally made it home to Orange County at 4:15 pm? A mile farther up the road than the mile I went? Of course you do.



The title Tiny Shoes, by the way, is reference to one of my favorite Jack Chick tracts.