favorite things 04

lately it's gotten a little chillier around here in the mornings and evenings. and it's getting harder to justify throwing on my flip-flops. i do love the change in season though, and here in california we really haven't got a clue what fall and winter can really be like. but i'm cool with that too. around here these are kind of standard issue. when i was a kid and summer came around, my mom would throw us in the back of her old volvo, and we'd drive over to payless drugs and proceed to stand in the summer aisle with one foot in a shoe and the other shoe off, bent stork-like to the bottom of a new pair of flip-flops. (one summer was about all you'd get as a kid) i never paid attention to what these cost back then, but when i was twenty-one getting ready for a summer driving trip across the country, my friend said "hey, let's go down to payless and get a new pair of flip-flops. they only cost like thirty-nine cents" what?! i tramped all over america that summer in my newest cheapest footware, feeling the sand between my toes at alamagordo, gazing the vistas at grand canyon and monument valley. i dipped my dirty toes in them along the mississippi and felt whitman's warm leaves of grass curl around my bare feet. that's a lot of mileage for less than two quarters. and somewhere along the highway one of them fell out of our westfalia to end up another lonely and forlorn piece of the american roadside. although i lamented it at the time, at the next town i pulled out some more change and started all over again. (the next pair just weren't the same) in a world where shoes define so much about who we are, what we do and how much we're worth, i can't think of a more democratic rebuttal.