New Birthday Sneakers!
Magic in new shoes, Gazelles!
Softly, secretly
I got the wonderful gift of a new pair of sneakers for my birthday from my wife.
Magic is in a new pair of shoes.
I turned 59.
I still feel the magic in a new pair of sneakers.
Nowhere is this better described then in some of the best writing this side of Mark Twain by Ray Bradbury.
From Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Late that night, going home from the show with his mother and father and his brother
Tom, Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He glanced quickly away,
but his ankles were seized, his feet suspended, then rushed. The earth spun; the shop
awnings slammed their canvas wings overhead with the thrust of his body running. His
mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him. Douglas walked
backward, watching the tennis shoes in the midnight window left behind.
“It was a nice movie,” said Mother.
Douglas murmured, “It was . . .”
It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a
summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything
everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the
sidewalks, stranding the houses. Any moment the town would capsize, go down and
leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood, trapped on the dead
cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.
“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para
Litefoot Shoes …”
His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of
sneakers. Can you do that?”
“Well . . .”
It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes
for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the
hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them
suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the
covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the
first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below,
half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water.
“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted.
They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of
grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the
shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the
shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to
the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Douglas tried to get all this in words.
“Yes,” said Father, “but what’s wrong with last year’s sneakers? Why can’t you dig
them out of the closet?”
Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all
year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather
shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new
tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the
new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but now in late June
there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs.
“Don’t you see?” said Douglas. “I just can’t use last year’s pair.”
For last year’s pair were dead inside. They had been fine when he started them out,
last year. But by the end of summer, every year, you always found out, you always
knew, you couldn’t really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were
dead. But this was a new year, and he felt that this time, with this new pair of shoes, he
could do anything, anything at all.
They walked up on the steps to their house. “Save your money,” said Dad. “In five or
six weeks—”
“Summer’ll be over!”
Lights out, with Tom asleep, Douglas lay watching his feet, far away down there at the
end of the bed in the moonlight, free of the heavy iron shoes, the big chunks of winter
fallen away from them.
“Reasons. I’ve got to think of reasons for the shoes.”
Well, as anyone knew, the hills around town were wild with friends putting cows to
riot, playing barometer to the atmospheric changes, taking sun, peeling like calendars
each day to take more sun. To catch those friends, you must run much faster than foxes
or squirrels. As for the town, it steamed with enemies grown irritable with heat, so
remembering every winter argument and insult. Find friends, ditch enemies! That was
the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot motto. Does the world run too fast? Want to catch up?
Want to be alert, stay alert? Litefoot, then! Litefoot!”
He held his coin bank up and heard the faint small tinkling, the airy weight of money
there.
Whatever you want, he thought, you got to make your own way. During the night
now, let’s find that path through the forest . . .
Downtown, the store lights went out, one by one. A wind blew in the window. It was
like a river going downstream and his feet wanting to go with it.
In his dreams he heard a rabbit running running running in the deep warm grass.
Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the proprietor of a pet shop must
move through his shop where are kenneled animals from everywhere in the world,
touching each one briefly along the way. Mr. Sanderson brushed his hands over the
shoes in the window, and some of them were like cats to him and some were like dogs; he touched each pair with concern, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stood in the
exact center of the carpet and looked around, nodding.
There was a sound of growing thunder.
One moment, the door to Sanderson’s Shoe Emporium was empty. The next, Douglas
Spaulding stood clumsily there, staring down at his leather shoes as if these heavy things could not be pulled up out of the cement. The thunder had stopped when his shoes stopped. Now, with painful slowness, daring to look only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He made careful stacks of nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter, like someone playing chess and worried if the next move carried him out into sun or deep into shadow.
“Don’t say a word!” said Mr. Sanderson.
Douglas froze.
“First, I know just what you want to buy,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Second, I see you
every afternoon at my window; you think I don’t see? You’re wrong. Third, to give it its
full name, you want the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: ‘LIKE
MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!’ Fourth, you want credit.”
“No!” cried Douglas, breathing hard, as if he’d run all night in his dreams. “I got
something better than credit to offer!” he gasped. “Before I tell, Mr. Sanderson, you got
to do me one small favor. Can you remember when was the last time you yourself wore a pair of Litefoot sneakers, sir?”
Mr. Sanderson’s face darkened. “Oh, ten, twenty, say, thirty years ago. Why . . . ?”
“Mr. Sanderson, don’t you think you owe it to your customers, sir, to at least try the
tennis shoes you sell, for just one minute, so you know how they feel? People forget if
they don’t keep testing things. United Cigar Store man smokes cigars, don’t he? Candy-
store man samples his own stuff, I should think. So . . .”
“You may have noticed,” said the old man, “I’m wearing shoes.”
“But not sneakers, sir! How you going to sell sneakers unless you can rave about them
and how you going to rave about them unless you know them?”
Mr. Sanderson backed off a little distance from the boy’s fever, one hand to his chin.
“Well …”
“Mr. Sanderson,” said Douglas, “you sell me something and I’ll sell you something just
as valuable.”
“Is it absolutely necessary to the sale that I put on a pair of the sneakers, boy?” said
the old man.
“I sure wish you could, sir!”
The old man sighed. A minute later, seated panting quietly, he laced the tennis shoes
to his long narrow feet. They looked detached and alien down there next to the dark cuffs of his business suit.
Mr. Sanderson stood up.
“How do they feel?” asked the boy.
“How do they feel, he asks; they feel fine.” He started to sit down.
“Please!” Douglas held out his hand. “Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, sponge around, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? It’s this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, but-
soon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens?”
“What?”
“Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, bum your trash,
run to the post office, telegraph office, library! You’ll see twelve of me in and out, in and
out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast they’d take me? All
those springs inside? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they kind of grab hold and
can’t let you alone and don’t like you just standing there? Feel how quick I’d be doing the things you’d rather not bother with? You stay in the nice cool store while I’m jumping all around town! But it’s not me really, it’s the shoes. They’re going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back! There they go!”
Mr. Sanderson stood amazed with the rush of words. When the words got going the man at last, “in five years, how would you like a job selling shoes in this emporium?”
“Gosh, thanks, Mr. Sanderson, but I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”
“Anything you want to be, son,” said the old man, “you’ll be. No one will ever stop
you.”
The old man walked lightly across the store to the wall of ten thousand boxes, came
back with some shoes for the boy, and wrote up a list on some paper while the boy was
lacing the shoes on his feet and then standing there, waiting.
The old man held out his list. “A dozen things you got to do for me this afternoon.
Finish them, we’re even Stephen, and you’re fired.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sanderson!” Douglas bounded away.
“Stop!” cried the old man.
Douglas pulled up and turned.
Mr. Sanderson leaned forward.
“How do they feel?” The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of
wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out.
“Antelopes?” said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes. “Gazelles?”
The boy thought about it, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he
vanished. He just spun about with a whisper and went off. The door stood empty. The
sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat.
Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-blazed door, listening. From a long time ago, when he
dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky,
gone through brush, under trees, away, and only the soft echo of their running left
behind.
“Antelopes,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Gazelles.”
He bent to pick up the boy’s abandoned winter shoes, heavy with forgotten rains and
long-melted snows. Moving out of the blazing sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly, he
headed back toward civilization . . .
No Haiku For You 