The first thing I notice about someone is their shoes.
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Wendell Phillip Russell Jr., took his first steps one fall day in Oberlin, Ohio, just as the leaves were beginning to blush and the students were coming home from class.
Some tell me it happened just as my grandfather had come home from work and my father was so excited that he stood up and started walking toward him. Hilda, my grandmother, says it happened after an arduous few hours of trying to coerce my father to walk toward her. My father usually tries to slip in a few lines about divine intervention, how it was destiny that it happened when it did—he always adds in details like that into his stories, a trait I can only assume he acquired from my grandfather—a man who swore to the day he died that he saw a snake roll down a hill like a car tire. The only thing that I know for sure is that somehow, someway, it happened and there is a lustrous bronze baby shoe resting on my father’s dresser to prove it.
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A shoe is an item of footwear intended to protect and comfort the human foot while doing various activities.
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Shoes have never been very comfortable for me; I’m flat-footed.
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Legend has it my older brother was discharged from the Air Force because he’s flat-footed; my family has always been skeptical of this reasoning, but some rocks are better left unturned.
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The history of human development shows that the importance of protecting the foot was recognized early on—records of the Egyptians, the Chinese and other early civilizations all contain references to shoes.
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As a kid I used to try and walk around the house in my father’s shoes; I can still picture the irritated look on my mother’s face as I stomped around the kitchen floor. It seems like that’s a universal thing kids do—trying on their parents’ shoes. Maybe because most kids aspire to be like their parents; maybe that Joe South song is universally heard growing up.
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“Walk a mile in my shoes, walk a mile in my shoes
Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Walk a mile in my shoes”
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Feet freak me out, even my own. I’m not exactly sure what it is about them in particular that makes my spine tingle, they just do. They remind me of the Face-Huggers in the Alien movies; maybe that is why I adore shoes so much—they mask the monsters living at the bottom of our legs.
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August 2012, one of the first things I bought when I moved to East Lansing, Michigan, was a pair of Vans E-Street stonewashed plimsoll shoes in green. They’re a low-key shoe, nothing in particular is extraordinary about them, but I love them. I started dating you soon after I bought them and because of that I associate them with you.
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A plimsoll shoe is a type of athletic shoe with a canvas upper and rubber sole developed as beachwear in the 1830s by the Liverpool Rubber Company. Some people in the United Kingdom call them sand shoes.
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When I read that passage while researching shoes it makes me feel much better about the fact that I wear shoes on the beach. If only more people would do the same, the beach wouldn’t be such a horrifying place for me.
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I was enthralled with a girl one time, then I saw her feet.
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Why did L. Frank Baum decide to make the iconic magical item Dorothy finds in Oz Silver Shoes of all things?
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In the theatrical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, technology that allowed for vibrant color in film had becoming affordable and the studio decided to change Dorothy’s slippers from silver to a sequined ruby red.
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My creative nonfiction professor likes to wear boots, especially ankle boots. She has a grey pair that I am particularly fond of.
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Neil Armstrong’s boots are still floating around in space somewhere. I wonder if his footprints are still on the moon or if aliens have brushed them off yet.
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It wasn’t until 1818, that the right shoe was invented. Until that time, there was no distinction between shoes made for left or right feet.
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Human footprints are very similar; it’s hard to distinguish one person’s size 10 foot from another’s. As a species we are incredibly worried about leaving our own personal mark on the world. I wonder if that is why we started making shoes in the first place, so we could have a slightly different imprint on the dirt than the next guy.
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George Clooney, in a recent interview, revealed that in his spare time he is a cobbler.
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Cobbler: A shoemaker who repairs shoes, rather than manufacturing them.
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Keds were first mass-marketed as canvas-top “sneakers” in 1917. The word “sneaker” was coined by Henry Nelson McKinney, an advertising agent for N. W. Ayer & Son, because the rubber sole made the shoe stealthy or quiet. All other shoes, with the exception of moccasins, made noise when you walked.
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That’s funny because I cringe at the echoing sounds my Keds ceaselessly produce whenever I’m walking in the quiet side of the library.
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A sneakerhead is a person who collects, trades or admires sneakers as a hobby. The hobby grew in popularity in the 1980s with Michael Jordan’s rise in popularity in the NBA and the release of the Air Jordan shoe.
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A few weekends ago I woke up at a friend’s house and was appalled to find her walking around the room without socks on—for all I know that actually could have been a nightmare.
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March 2013, I am kissing you goodbye outside of my dorm. You’re wearing black flats with a petite black ribbon trailing from the heel and ending in a bow just before the cracks of your toes. It’s raining out, but I don’t notice the holes forming in the heels of the Vans I bought just before we started dating.
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My father has always had a love for shoes, maybe that bronze baby shoe ignited the fire in him. On the weekends he’d take out all of his different polishes from under the kitchen sink and I’d sit and watch him lather black and brown dress shoes with the appropriate creams. I love the smell of shoe polish, it falls into that odd category of unhealthy chemical scents that for some reason smell good—nail polish, gasoline, and hairspray to name a few.
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In the early 1930s, Violet Shinbach was shopping at a department store in Cleveland, Ohio, when she saw something that caught her eye in a shop window, a simple pair of baby shoes that had been “bronzed”. Four years later, Violet opened up the first ever dedicated shoe bronzing company in Columbus, Ohio, the Bron-Shoe Company.
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I wonder if my grandparents got my father’s shoes bronzed by them, although at that point in time the company’s name had changed to The American Bronzing Company.
The earliest known daguerreotype (the first form of photography) of a human features a man having his shoes shined.
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For a long time our cat Seti would poop in my father’s shoes if we were out of the house too long—Seti always knew where to hit him where it hurt.
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As a boy in New York City Malcom X shined shoes in a nightclub.
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I’d love to meet the person who woke up one day with the idea of making shoes for dogs. They are certainly living a better life than me.
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Sometimes I wish that I was an old man just so I wouldn’t have to take my shoes off when going through airport security.
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My grandfather was Harry Winston’s chauffer when my father was a child. Harry Winston was a small man and he’d give my grandfather some of his old clothes for my father to wear—specifically two pairs of immaculate Spectator shoes, one pair black and white, the other brown and white. It’s funny that the man who owned the Hope diamond for many years was so small that my father’s twelve-year-old self could fit in his shoes.
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When I was a kid I had a horrible time learning to tie my shoes.
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Gurkha soldiers, fighting for Britain, crawled along the ground, feeling the laces of the soldiers they encountered. British soldiers employed straight- or bar-lacing, while Japanese troops employed a crisscross pattern. Crisscross laces could therefore mean the difference between life and death
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Pro tip: If you see a pair of shoes laced together hanging from a power-line know that you can buy crack around there.
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My next door neighbor says “Morning, Phil,” to me every day—I have no idea what his name is, but I do know that he wears white Nike Air Force 1s every day and his roommate, a guy I see rarely, wears limited edition Live Strong Nike Free Run 3.0s.
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A convicted killer escaped a secure cell twice by picking the lock with a shoelace, climbing 28ft over barbed wire and smashing down a wooden door.
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He learned to pick a lock with a shoelace. Give this man a job.
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Shoelaces are also used to hang one’s self in prison. Because of this many prisons do not allow inmates to wear shoes with shoelaces in them.
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March 2014, a year has passed since I kissed you outside my dorm on that rainy night. I am standing with you on a frozen lake watching the sunset and I’m worried that your foot is going to get frostbite from when you stepped in a puddle on our way here—you’re wearing black shoes this time too, but they are different from the petite flats you wore the year before. We’ve changed places—you are wearing the Vans this year. The heels of mine are torn apart now, the fabric frayed and torn trying to cling on to what remains. I can only wear them when the weather is nice—they let in everything now, mud, water, snow, wind, but I’m not ready to part with them just yet. I’ve looked online at the prospects of buying a new pair—of course they are discontinued now—and, the thought of buying them second hand scares me. Whose feet have been in them? What do they smell like? Most of all where have they walked in them?
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“Momma always says there’s an awful lot you can tell about a person by their shoes. Where they’re going. Where they’ve been.”
Phillip Russell is an undergraduate student at Michigan State University where he studies English with a concentration in Creative Writing as well as a minor in Japanese. He published his first personal essay when he was procrastinating to write a college final. To his friends’ dismay it bolstered his big-headedness. A trait he’d discovered in the Bahamas, in a taxi, as he waited for paramedics to free his head between the car’s two front seats. His work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Crunchable, and is forthcoming is Dialogual.
Photo credit: The Cobbler, Betws-yn-Rhos by John Thomas (1838-1905), from John Thomas Collection at the National Library of Wales