During this year’s edition of my annual back-to-school pack-a-thon, I was digging through the caverns of my closet when I was reunited with, along with a battalion of aggressive-looking balls of dust, my favorite pair of boots.
“Ah, boots!” I remember saying hungrily, grabbing them, pulling them back into reality and planning ahead of time all the fun things we’d do together this year.
“We’ll go crunching leaves, walking in the snow and riding up escalators.”
But my buzz was killed when I noticed that in the light of day, they looked considerably less able than they used to. The leather, which had once been a deliciously sanguine red, was now dulled and muted with age and shone a sickly brownish-maroon. The soles were thinned, the leather was detaching in many areas, and the heels looked like they had been attacked by wild dogs. There was a giant smear of grease from my bike chain on the inner calf area of the right shaft, and the lining inside both was tearing and threadbare.
My boots had obviously contracted some degenerate leather-eating disease. And the more I looked at them, the more terminal the condition seemed to become.
They were finished.
Now the weather is chilling and the leaves are just beginning to crackle. Now would be the time I’d slip on my red boots and go romp, relishing in the jealous looks they’d receive from sneakered passersby. But now I’m stuck with boring, brown riding boots and lame, camel ankle boots. Sigh, yawn, am beige and bland? like a Triscuit.
The truth is, Boston has taken my red boots from me and swallowed them up along with my fairly new pair of gladiator sandals and my ex-favorite pair of silver ballet flats. There’s something in the tarmac around here that infects every shoe — even yours — and eats away at them, stitch by stitch, vamp by vamp.
And now that the mourning stage has passed, I’m just all-around ticked. Until now, I’ve taken it all in stride: walking miles in the torrential sporadic rain showers, climbing endless steps to get in and out of everything, and traversing barren plazas while being rattled by prickly tongues of wind that relentlessly lick you like those of excitable cats. I’ve suffered through the endless construction in Kenmore Square and on Commonwealth Avenue, the dangerous chasms between sidewalk panels and the overzealous joggers whose ponytails lash you as they pass. But when all the perils of being an urban pedestrian start to break down not only the soles, but also the souls, of my dear shoes, well, that’s an unequivocal dealbreaker.
And don’t accuse me of being neurotic. This is not all in my head. I’ve got a whole handful of friends who’ve suffered similar losses — Barrie, for example, is still sensitive about the Gatsby-esque canvas sneaker-shaped void in his life, and Lib pays her respects every year around mid-January at the exact street corner in Allston when she first began to feel snow seep into her once-resilient cowboy boots long ago. The city is a veritable graveyard of footwear — shoe ghosts lurk everywhere, cursing their old stomping grounds that caused their premature deaths.
Logic says there’s an appropriate shoe for every place — Sperrys for the coast, Wellies for Seattle and/or London, gladiator sandals for European island vacations, Ugg boots for Warren Towers corridors . . . the list is long, sure, but definitive. Footwear choice should not be this big of a deal.
But what of living in this city? In this chaotic melting pot of erratic weather and unpredictable infrastructure and impenetrable foot traffic, it’s sometimes hard to even open an umbrella. Imagine what it’s like to be a shoe in this messy urban sprawl — put yourself in your shoes’ shoes. Those pleasant little clicks of stilettos on cement? Perhaps they’re not mating calls at all, but rather your shoes’ way of saying, “Ow, stop!”
But alas, in this most fashionable generation, how likely are we to choose function over fashion? If we can’t define our city with our shoes, then we’ll make our shoes fit in any way we can and deal with the consequences as they come. I’m not the kind of urbanite, after all, to let a few broken heels and chipped curbsides stop me from exercising my right to fierce footwear. And neither are you. I know these things.
Instead, we’ll be envied for our steadfastness to our sport — we’ll be the people snapped by WeeklyDig photographers and interviewed about how tough we are. They’ll ask us — they always do — why we choose to wear three-inch heels for shopping trips and why we choose to wear expensive suede boots in snowstorms, and we’ll respond that practicality is relative. To some people, rubber in rain is the only answer — and then there are those of us who realize that blisters heal and wet feet dry.
Lauren Rodrigue, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].
