Benham: Shoes are plentiful, so why do some people go without?
| Saturday, Jun 10 2006 5:45 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Jun 12 2006 6:19 PM
Recently, I saw a man leaving the liquor store at the corner of 18th and H and crossing the street to the downtown hotel where he apparently lived.
It was early in the morning. He was clutching a brown bag with an already open bottle. He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt but no shoes. He had either forgotten to put on shoes or chosen not to wear them.
When I see someone without shoes in an urban setting, it evokes a mixture of wonder, sadness and curiosity. Why would someone choose to go shoeless on a surface that does not welcome bare, even calloused feet?
It is not as if there is a shortage of shoes. Shoes are like used tires. No matter how many you throw away, send in care packages to poor countries or toss tied together over electrical wires, there is still a pile high enough on which to approach the moon.
Our new dog, Polo, is in the teething stage and in efforts to distract him from chewing the green picnic table, the redwood deck, the corner of the weight bench and the shop towels, I have been feeding him shoes.
When I ran short of garage shoes, I rummaged around in my daughter's closet and grabbed half a dozen pairs of Payless specials that had been abandoned. They included shoes with cork bottoms, leather straps and white canvas uppers. There were probably 20 more pairs where those came from.
Polo was happy and for a moment his attention had been diverted from chewing the more permanent parts of the landscape.
My point is shoes are so plentiful you don't even have to buy them. They swim, morph, melt and sneak into your life by the black trashbag full.
Yet, there are pockets, almost associations, of people who don't wear shoes. In addition to the downtowners, you can find many of them in Oildale walking on the sidewalk along North Chester.
These are not American Indians. These are people who are just not wearing shoes. Mostly men, but women too. They are making a statement but what kind of statement are they really making?
Might that statement include the feeling of bare feet against the coolness of concrete?
However, city concrete is not beach sand. This is not the squishy mud in the Kern River. These are city streets rife with red plastic straws, jagged bottle caps, bits of glass, small troublesome rocks and shards of asphalt.
When I imagine the minefield that a sidewalk can be and see a pedestrian navigating that unreliable surface, my response is to pull over and engage them in a conversation about shoes.
These are shoes.
Even the word is relaxing. Shoes, like cloth napkins, make civilization better.
However, I never do. It is one thing to hand a homeless man a coat on a cold, foggy winter day, but who feels confident enough to do the same with shoes? For one thing, there is the problem of shoe sizes.
The shoeless soul might look like a 9 but actually be an 11. The only thing worse than no shoes are shoes that don't have that comfortable fit.
Suffice to say, my instruction is: wear shoes.
If you don't feel better, and it's hard to imagine you won't, we will.