Take that, Lonny June!

Here's how it went down:

My everyday shoes were starting to look ratty, which was fine by me because they felt great and it had taken all summer to get them that way. But school was coming soon and Mom wasn't having one of here kids going around in ratty looking shoes. So we got in the Fury III station wagon and headed for the Western Mall and the shoe store where we always bought my shoes, Lavergne's I think it was called.

The best thing about this shoe store was the fire engine. It sat out in the middle of the store, an antique number that some clever person had converted to display shoes and hold shoeboxes. The best thing about the fire engine was that you could climb into the driver's seat and crank the steering wheel, although by this time I was at the age where I was starting to feel self-conscious about "playing" if other kids were around.

I picked out a pair of red sneakers (this was years before the term "athletic shoe" had any cultural significance). They had white rubber soles and white laces and white caps on the toes and I thought they were so damn snappy that I wore them home, walking with a special new-shoe bounce in my step.

Then my sister Lonny got a load of my new shoes. Particularly as teenager, Lonny had an exceptional gift for sarcasm, and she proceeded to rain coals of sarcastic fire on my head, to the point that Mom told her to lay off. But, of course, the damage was done.

I got over it, because that's what you do after one of your older sisters makes fun of your shoes. I kept wearing those red sneakers, because we were not the kind of people who returned perfectly good shoes because somebody made fun of them. Eventually those red sneakers started to look ratty and were replaced by another pair of sneakers. That's how it is with shoes.

But somewhere in the back of my mind was a tiny nugget of grief over the loss of that new-shoe shine. I suspect this is so because last summer my friend Fred had a post on his blog that made reference to buying himself a pair of bright orange Pumas because he felt special. I suspect that the idea of brightly colored shoes drifted into the back of mind and bumped up against that nugget of grief.

Then a few days before my last birthday, I came across the shoes pictured above in a catalogue and thought, "Damn it, I'm getting myself a pair of red shoes!" And so I did.

And if the angels want to wear my red shoes, I can't say I blame them.