After finding chalk but no eraser, I walked home along a quiet street and felt that my shoe was untied. I bent down and tied it. When I straightened up, I noticed that I had been standing or squatting in the same place on a slightly unfamiliar sidewalk, where no one else was walking, to the side of a driveway with a one-car garage, in front of someone’s back pantry window, for probably ninety seconds. Anyone who saw me would think I was scoping the place out for a burglary. I realized that my excuse, if someone asked, would sound weird: “I was tying my shoelace.”
When was the last time I ever saw anyone tie their shoelaces in public? It must have been years. Tying your shoelaces is an obsolete activity from the fifties, like repairing a TV or mailing a personal letter. It isn’t done anymore. People wear shoes all the time. Why don’t I see at least one or two a day hunched over, fiddling with their laces? It could be because the urban youths in my neighborhood wear their sneakers as loosely fastened as their pants. It could be that people drive more and walk less, putting less strain on their laces between the times when they tie them leaving the house.
Most likely, my own loose laces were the result of wearing shoes that are almost worn out. It’s not just that I’m a week away from the time when I start to feel the pavement without the mediation of my sole, it’s also that the laces have worn their tracks smooth over the leather of the upper, so that there’s very little to grip and keep them from unravelling. You don’t see too many people in the same situation because old, worn-out shoes are another obsolete remnant from different times. Shoes now are either so top-shelf that they last forever, or they are so cheap that you are supposed to throw them out in a month. (Or– in my experience– they’re both expensive and ephemeral.)
The rarity of shoes that are neither too cheap to last for a day nor everlasting occurred to me when I saw a piece of yellowing paper that I had inserted in a book a year earlier. Old, yellow paper is another obscurity, like vacuum tubes. If a piece of information is only supposed to last a few days, it either goes on the internet or it is printed on a receipt that you throw away when you empty your pockets to change pants. If something is going to last any longer, it gets printed on the most expensive, archival, acid-free, time-proof, boutique paper that retailers can force you to buy. It’s a rare bit of writing that’s supposed to last somewhere between six months and five years, like the notes I scratched on a 3 by 5 card before putting that card into a library book that I had to return today, just as it’s a rare shoe that’s designed to last more than a year for less than a thousand dollars.
3 comments:
Two thoughts: first, the urban professional woman (not THAT kind of professional woman) often wears laceless leather boots through the winter months. (OK... this might include that kind of woman, after all). So half the population of the wintry city has no need to tie laces much of the time.
Second, as I was walking at a slowish pace to get lunch today, I was passed by a man in what certainly looked to be a lady wig. All I heard in my head was: "a maaaaan... in a lady wig," while suppressing the urge to tug it to see if it was real. It didn't look real at all.
The man in the lady-wig in front of the white board is as far from "the thing" as one can get, I think.
My understanding is that THAT kind of woman has lots of laces on her boots and elsewhere, but she doesn't necessarily have to tie them herself.
Maybe everyone else in Chicago just saw this:
http://lifehacker.com/5451765/ditch-the-granny-knot-to-tie-your-shoes-more-efficiently
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