The first is a group of teenagers playing “Keep Away” with someone's stinky sneaker. I see small limbs reaching desperately to grab the shoe as it sails from the front to the third row seat of the driver's daddy's gas guzzling Denali. “Gimme it........!” he whines pawing the air helplessly as it flies straight out the window. “Ooops. Sorry,” giggle the older and much “cooler” kids.
Scenario number two: While traveling to the local “Goodwill” drop-off location, with garbage bags filled to the limit containing outgrown clothing and barely used footwear in the bed of your pickup truck, you hit the mother of all potholes, sending one precariously balanced Nike bouncing over the passenger side edge and onto the gravel-laden road. (quite a bit less likely than the first scene.)
If I am truthful, though, scenario number three describes what I feel when I see a lone gym shoe stranded on the side of the street--a deep unsettled sense of foreboding. My gut whispers to me that something is not right while horror film theme music plays in the back of my mind. In this third story line, I imagine a dead body rolled up in plaid flannel sheets and plastic tarp being dragged across a dark road, two large feet protruding from the end of the roll. A sneaker is unintentionally dislodged as the body is pulled into and out of that huge pothole and left untied and muddy, footless and unmatched. It lies fixed and lifeless, the only clue to the latest in a series of unsolved mysteries in our suburbs..... (I have to stop! I'm scaring myself)
Probably the most disturbing part of all this missing footwear is the fact that the majority of the ones I have seen are adult-sized! I find it much easier to believe that kids could lose a shoe on the side of the road. That's what children do, they misplace things. Maybe a young tike was being dragged across the street by an elder brother and happened to accidently “run” out of her untied Skecher. With that in mind, finding a tiny pink patent-leather “mary jane” is not as hard to wrap my brain around as is a brown leather, size eleven men's loafer.
What I would give to trace the history of that lone shoe! To follow it backwards from the yellow median line to the sweaty, athlete footed appendage which once called it home. To solve the mystery and know the trials and tribulations it has endured to find itself in a predicament such as this one.
But alas, that is not possible. I must be content with my own version of the events and allow my imagination to determine the reasons behind this perplexing puzzle.
NOTE TO READERS: If you are lucky enough to be privy to the real story behind one of these shoe mysteries, please please please share it with me in the comment section below! I'm not sure how long I can go on without knowing a legitimate answer. I will be forced to imagine ever-worsening scenarios until I do!
Check out the following links to donate shoes to needy children around the world:
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