Ugly Child, Ugly Shoes

I actually don’t remember buying these shoes, but I do remember liking them a lot when they were brand new. It was the ninth grade. Everyone was excited to be at the top of the junior high heap, and everyone was hiding their apprehensions about high school. I was enjoying my increasing fashion awareness, and an important addition to my fashionable image was a pair of brown shoes.

They were in style. All the girls had a pair, it seemed, and I really wanted some myself. Finally I obtained them—a pair of brown Predictions (they weren’t the Sketchers brand that everyone else had, but I didn’t mind), probably from Payless, and they became a frequent addition to my wardrobe. In fact, I probably wore them every day of that school year. My very favorite outfit with the shoes featured blue Unionbay flare-leg pants, a white shirt and my red three-quarter sleeve sweater.

Very soon the laces began to wear. They had always been an awkward length, too short to stay tied in a neat little bow, so I began wearing them loose, the laces hanging down and barely brushing the floor. Before long the plastic tips had been completely worn off and I was left with frayed brown strings, sometimes wrapped in Scotch tape, flinging around my feet. But I didn’t care, I still loved them.

I continued to wear the shoes off and on throughout high school, even after the Unionbay pants and the red sweater were gone, and even after I got a different pair of brown shoes with a square toe. When it came time to go to college, I left them at home, discarded refuse from my past, and ignored them for a while. Then one Christmas or Thanksgiving break I happened to put them on and fall in love with them again. There is just something kind of nice about a pair of brown shoes with jeans. They stayed at my parents’ house, but I wore them nearly every time I came home for a break.

Now I am married, and we have been trying to diminish our clothing possessions so that we actually have room for all the clothing that belong in our tiny closet. My mom dumped all my old clothes on me a few months back, trying to get her basement bedroom relatively free of my still-present clutter, and among the old clothes were the brown shoes. I wore them a few times to class, but they pulled my socks down under my heel while walking up the hill. And there is no arch support left. And the toes are scraped up due to my clumsiness climbing stairs. Not to mention the sad state of the laces. So they sat in the closet all winter, until the snows melted and the rains stopped (sort of) and Jordan and I decided to do a little spring cleaning.

I should get rid of these shoes. They have been in my possession for almost eight years now. They look like they could possibly make it another couple years (especially after you’ve seen the likes of the Pumas that Jordan wore in high school, the formerly white sneakers that exposed both of his pinky toes to the elements), but I think I am ready to move on. Ready to move on from looking “cool,” and maybe go for something a little more "classy"; ready to move on to something a little cuter, since now these poor things are almost as ugly as I was when I bought them; ready to move on to other brown shoes, possibly with heels, or maybe just with laces intact.