Cheap Shoes

Cheap Shoes White canvas slip-ons with a blue line like the trim on a yacht. Such plain comfort for $5.99 that today someone said, "Where are your shoes?" thinking they were my socks. But I feel almost luxurious, tropical, Panamanian and so relaxed that there are palm trees, mangoes, pink flamingos every step I take in this flat mid-western American town. To match my mock elegance I wear my baggiest blue jeans, 4 inches too large in the waist, my blousiest shirt open half way and people say, 53 "You're so thin, have you been ill?" But to me, it's the attire of a man with plenty of time to get from one place to another, time to sip an iced coffee and browse through the aisles of the bookstore and buy nothing, to saunter the baked white sidewalks, flat-footed, tanned, slim and not glossy with sweat. These white canvas shoes conjure up the old country I've never known and its piazzas, the chiming of steeple bells, the rolled up sleeves of the old men playing bocee in the shade of the church, their hands waving black cigars, juice-glasses of red wine — the fig trees' 54 blue shadows. While the sun pours through my clothes I jingle a pocket full of change to the tempo of some tune I've made up. But these shoes have their own tune. Quiet as their soft rubber soles, they move in only one direction — to their own demise. The grid of the soles becomes smooth, the white of the canvas becomes dull, the strength of the stitch like sinews collapsing. In their end perhaps even with a light snow on the ground I'll slip them on to take out the trash. With rag wool socks they'll be 55 like two old men too old to bear the weather, bound indoors spending their last few days as slippers. Ray Ronci University ofNebraska-Lincoln 56 ...