44 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
44 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
Eric writes about the shoes
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<p>Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to <a href="http://www.shoeblogs.com/wordpress/2005/09/07/essay-contest/">Manolo’s<br />
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Essay Contest</a>. The constraints — low word count, a subject<br />
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that really doesn’t interest me much — appealed to me. I<br />
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figured if I could produce something interesting under those<br />
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circumstances, it would be an accomplishment.</p>
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<p>Here it is. You be the judge…</p>
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<p><span id="more-210"></span></p>
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<p>I’m a geek, not a fashion plate. I don’t think about shoes a lot,<br />
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but I know what I like — and when I do think about shoes, I’m<br />
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profoundly grateful for some of the changes that have come about in my<br />
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lifetime. I’m thinking, more than anything else, of the way athletic<br />
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shoes have taken over the world.</p>
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<p>When I was a kid back in the 1960s and early 1970s, “shoes” still<br />
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meant, basically, “hard leather oxfords”. Ugly stiff things with a<br />
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high-maintainence finish that would scuff if you breathed on them.<br />
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What I liked was sneakers. But in those bygone days you didn’t get<br />
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to wear sneakers past a certain age, unless you were doing sneaker<br />
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things like playing basketball. And I sucked at basketball.</p>
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<p>I revolted against the tyranny of the oxford by wearing desert boots,<br />
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which back then weren’t actually boots at all but a kind of high-top<br />
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shoe with a suede finish and a grip sole. These were just barely<br />
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acceptable in polite company; in fact, if you can believe this, I was<br />
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teased about them at school. It was a more conformist time.</p>
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<p>I still remember the first time I saw a shoe I actually liked and<br />
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wanted to own, around 1982. It was called an Aspen, and it was built<br />
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exactly like a running shoe but with a soft suede upper. Felt like<br />
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sneakers on my feet, looked like a grownup shoe from any distance.<br />
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And I still remember exactly how my Aspens — both of them —<br />
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literally fell apart at the same moment as I was crossing Walnut<br />
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Street in West Philly. These were not well-made shoes. I had to limp<br />
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home.</p>
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<p>But better days were coming. In the early 1990s athletic shoes<br />
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underwent a kind of Cambrian explosion, proliferating into all kinds<br />
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of odd styles. Reebok and Rockport and a few other makers finally<br />
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figured out what I wanted — athletic-shoe fit and comfort with a<br />
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sleek all-black look I could wear into a client’s office, and no<br />
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polishing or shoe trees or any of that annoying overhead!</p>
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<p>I look around me today and I see that athletic-shoe tech has taken over.<br />
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The torture devices of my childhood are almost a memory. Thank you,<br />
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oh inscrutable shoe gods. Thank you Rockport. It’s not a big thing<br />
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like the Internet, but comfortable un-fussy shoes have made my life<br />
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better.</p>
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