Found on the street

Sometimes things just present themselves to you for inspection and evaluation. On a walk around the neighborhood in search of a some cottages that someone had told me about, I happened upon a pair of brown duck shoes abandoned on the sidewalk. You can see them here - just left on the street as if someone had slipped out of them for a minute to take a shower or to give his feet a breather.

There's so much stuff on the streets here - the usual newspapers and coffee cups tossed aside or blown out of overfilled trash cans, but also boxes of books, furniture, kitchen utensils, window screens - you name it, it's there to be taken. And usually it is. Come back five minutes later and it's as though vultures have descended and plucked the roadkill from the pavement.

The duck shoes seemed odd to me because, first of all, it was a pair, and abandoned shoes are usually singles. It reminded me of those pairs of shoes you see all around Seattle hanging from telephone wires or trees, deliberately tossed up in the air and across the wires, and said to indicate drug dealers' trading locales - though this could be an urban myth. (Here, the parallel is plastic bags in trees - if these plastic bags were swine flu, it'd be an epidemic.)

A few blocks past the duck shoes, I came upon a stoop sale where there was another pair of shoes, this one a kind of objet trouvé in the artlessness of its placement. Vintage but perfectly pristine white baby shoes sat atop an old school desk that someone had decoupaged in maps. The shoes appear oversized in this context, dwarfing the "world" they stand on. But their delicacy evokes a lost world of babyhood that certainly no longer exists in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, or anywhere else that I know of - baby's first shoes are more likely Nikes than stiff white leather hightops. And they were being sold as a bit of arcana, not as something real, whereas the duck shoes were actually functional footwear.

Later, with some Seattle friends in Times Square, the conversation turned to shoes as we watched the ladies of the evening parade around in 5-inch platforms and stilettos, wondering how they could navigate the streets of the city shod this way - or for that matter, how other women around us could make it around so easily in flip-flops. Neither option seemed to fit the city, but both also seemed perfect somehow. Either way, these women were working it in Times Square, and there's something to be said for standing on your own two feet, no matter what you're wearing.