A last look (at my shoes.)

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They've had it. They were good ones, but now they have got to go. Their bounce is gone. There are little see-throughs on one of the soles. They feel very broken in but a half-hour after putting them on, you realize that you might as well be barefoot. Shoes in New York City are your tires. Whatever you would be spending on new tires for a car, you spend on shoes in New York. Unless you are foolish enough to have a car, then you have to do both, only not as often for the tires for the car if you were living in say, Pigseye, Oklahoma, because, as the people I know who own a car in the city, you really don't drive it, you just have it, but you would still have to shell out the money for the shoes, because they do wear out.

I used to think it was the walking that wore them down. The schlepping of the groceries, going to the subway, running for the bus, getting down to the Post Office, the left'right zig-zag of pedestrianism. A pedometer I once owned in a semi-fit of some kind of physical fitness mania, showed that I was walking over four miles a day and that was before I started jogging/speed-walking/slogging. Add on those miles and I wore out the little black beast in about three months. I don't think it was made to handle the bouncing. But it's not the walking or running that wears out New York shoes, it's the standing. Shoes are made to be in motion and for a great deal of a New Yorker's day, the New Yorker is standing still and frozen as as an egret on the side of a pond. There's the waiting for the subway to arrive, there's the standing at the stop for the bus that you didn't run fast enough to catch, there's the line at the (Insert list here) deli, laundry, Post Office, hardware store, check out at the grocery, security post at your dentist's office building, the ATM, the restaurant (yes, a booth!), the subway entrance, the subway exit and at each and every street corner you may come to during the day. It's all that standing that compresses the padding, what little there is of it, to the thickness of a sheet of Phylo dough and makes your brain think that you are standing on the cold cement in your socks.
Now I have to go to Harry's or go online to Zappo's and get more shoes. The winter is near. I should get boots. I hate the heaviness, but I remember trying to ford the ten inch deep slush in the gutters last January. There we were, my thin running shoes and I, gathering the courage to make the leap. An egret, still and frozen, by the edge of a pond.