They are lined up on low Ikea shelves in the cluttered mudroom, spilling everywhere onto the floor. Every person living here kicks off their shoes upon entering. Each pair is a portrait of its owner, and it is effortless for me to identify them correctly. Outward or inward pronations are as much giveaways as is style. Only Jina walks that way, hah! Since Jinyo began working as a vet tech, he opts for medical Crocs, once a nerd style he would have shunned. Kalia’s tiny size five-and-a-half thrift store finds are a given.
In elementary school, I would doodle my classmates’ shoes in the margins of my marble notebooks. Since penny loafers were the uniform shoe, there was little variety in the Bic sketches, yet still, I could later identify each classmate by their shoe drawing. I did this for a couple of years. Was I working through something, or just bored? Not part of the popular crowd, this exercise allowed me clandestine entrée into the rarified atmosphere of the truly cool. Own their shoes, own them.
There are a number of shoe sayings. “Walk a mile in my shoes.” “Put yourself in my shoes.” “If the shoe fits . . .” And Cinderella’s, “One shoe can change your life.” There are more -- albeit fairly obscure sayings. When insisting fame had not muddled her sense of self, Oprah Winfrey famously stated, “I still have my feet on the ground. I just wear better shoes.” How is it that our shoes have taken the lion’s share of apparel metaphor? Shirts and pants? Dresses? Socks? Jackets? Not by a long shot. Are our shoes really a mirror to something deeper within us?
At the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on the western flank of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, there is a huge and eerie pile of shoes on display, taken from the feet of Jews on their way to the extermination camps. For survivors, bare feet conjured seared memories of the Shoah.
My barefootedness is not anything like this. On the contrary, It is a declaration of freedom, and even, maybe, a form of rebellion. I walk barefoot around the house, no matter the temperature. I like the feel of wood and tile and rug. If I must wear something, I prefer sandals and flip flops. When I was a child, we called them “thongs,” a term I can no longer use because of its other connotation. I wear flip flops well into winter, along with my down coat and double-wrapped scarf. It is a call of the wild, a spit into the wind. Defiance of weather’s strictures and society’s norms.
Yes, shoes are identifiers. “Give a girl the right pair of shoes, and she can conquer the world,” Marilyn Monroe had famously said. 19th century Irish labor organizer and feminist Mary Harris Jones (we know her as “Mother Jones”) wrote, “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me.” I imagine Jones’ sturdy oxfords, soles worn to nothingness, marching, traveling, stomping her feet in frustration and determination.
Shoes take us wherever we are going. They dance with us, run with us, march with us. They skip along with our childhood games, ski and skate down mountains and across frozen lakes. They supply support as we age, and often follow us into the ground, as if we might need them as we step onto the shores of heaven.
We know, of course, that shoes have soles. Why the homonym? Are they windows allowing us to peer into our deeper selves, our proverbial souls? Monroe, Winfrey, Jones and Cinderella might think so. If I brought this idea to my children, whose jumble of shoes hold court along the mudroom floor and Ikea shelves, they would surely smirk and return to their eye-roll-default setting of “mom is hopelessly ridiculous.”
Except Jinyo. He wouldn’t think that at all and, later, over an excellent coffee, he would confide that he has often thought in similar metaphoric fashion, except with hands. “ Look at people’s hands and form judgements,” he says. “Their movement, the way they hold a pen, or type, or smoke. Thumbs, knuckles, nails, and all, a person’s hands speak their own language and cannot lie.” I agree with my son. It’s odd that it is not feet that we speak about, but shoes. Shoes and hands. Palms and soles. Speaking the language of our own souls.
