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July 3, 2004
Girls In Comfortable Shoes
My daughter Cassidy just got her first pair of Chuck Taylors yesterday.
Black high top Converse.
The pinnacle of fashion in casual footwear.
I got my first pair of punk motherfucking Converse when I was 19. A white pair, which I then dyed black. My next pair, I got real black ones. For years that's the only kind of shoe I wore. Nothing but my punk motherfucking Converse. If it was good enough for Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee, it was good enough for me.
But see, I thought I was invincible. Especially my feet. I knew you were supposed to wear good running shoes with lots of support, but in New Orleans, it was always preferable to go barefoot as close to 100% of the time as possible. For me, that meant my daily run to the levee and back when I was a teenager was almost always barefoot. On cement.
Ouch! Yeah, yeah, I know. But at the time, it felt great. I felt like fucking Tarzan. I wasn't much for getting anywhere fast; I was a distance runner on the school track team, but I sucked, always came in last or close to it. But I could run forever without getting tired.
Then later on, after college, I gained a few pounds. Then a few more pounds. And somewhere around age 32 or so, my feet, probably damaged from the years of running barefoot and the years of wearing a shoe that was basically just a thin flap of rubber with some canvas stitched on, and suffering under the indignity of having to support a guy approaching 200 pounds when they were clearly only designed for 150 pounds or less...the feet just finally said "FUUUUUUCK this shit". And my arches crashed.
And Cassidy, bless her heart, is a big old pronator like her daddy. Her right foot turns in at a somewhat alarming angle.
I thought her mother and I had a deal, that Cass could get the Chucks as long as she also got a pair of nice healthy New Balance cross-trainers, but she and her mother apparently "ran out of time" on shopping day, so she's going to hoof it around Boston for two weeks in the Chucks. Curmudgeon dad stymied by yet another mother-daughter conspiracy.
Apparently I don't understand the needs of a ten year old girl. She's taking guitar lessons. And she's turning into a big old Ramones fan. And she does not want to wear some big clunky orthopedic New Balance astronaut shoes. She wants to look cool. And her mom wants her to look cool too.
And I want her to look cool. I just want her to not have to go through all the shitty physical therapy and contrast baths and all that shit I had to go through when my feet first committed suicide. I want to protect her.
I need the practice, protecting her through proper footware. And it's obvious that I can't. And then I worry about the big stuff coming. I want to protect her from inheriting my alcoholism, I want to protect her from boys like me (because I know what boys like me were after when I was a teenager and it was pretty much all bad), I want to protect her from the acid and the speed and the coke and the X, because even though I managed to leave all that behind, I know people who didn't and I worry that she won't be as strong and as lucky as I was.
And it's obvious that I can't protect her from any of that stuff either. I can give her tools, I can give her advice, I can give her comfortable shoes, and then that shit will all come and she will have to go through it all on her own.
Gina's friend Lori says that having a child is like forever letting your heart walk around outside your body. Dangerous dangerous stuff. How do parents do this? How did my mom face all that shit?
My heart walks around outside my body. In very cool high tops. And her feet don't hurt.
Posted by ray at July 3, 2004 6:19 PM | Permalink
Categories: [kids ]
Tags: worthy
Comments
This may very well be my favorite post so far.
Posted by: Sara at February 7, 2008 5:18 PM
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