SWEET BOOTS

Have you had what you thought was a really great idea, only to find out later that you were wrong? I’ve had this happen a number of times, like when I lopped off the end of my finger when I wanted to feel the movement of the hedge clippers as a child. It didn’t take off a lot, but a small part of my rounded finger tip was now square and bleeding. It seems amazing that I was selected to take the SAT’s for Duke in seventh grade for some Talent Identification Program (TIP) with this type of behavior, but I digress.

Behind my house in North Carolina a few hundred yards away there was a creek. Being eleven and tired of riding bikes for the afternoon, a friend and I went down to the creek to play in the sand. As we gingerly walked along the pipe that stretched from one side of the creek to the forbidden West Side and back, I got an idea. If my shoes are too wet to wear to school tomorrow, I can wear my sweet boots. BOOM! Into the water I went. The water, which was probably mostly run off from roads and highways, crested the tops of my shoes, filling them completely. Walking on what amounted to sponges on the way home, I felt pleased and a sense of accomplishment. I had beaten the system. No more tennis shoes for me at school. Tomorrow I got to show off my sweet boots.

So the next day shows itself and with my mom aggravated over my sopping wet sneaks, I was off to school in my sweet boots. I was walking tall. I didn’t recall anyone wearing such a sweet pair of boots to school. I was going to set a trend. The kids in my grade would marvel at the sweetest pair of boots they had ever seen.

The first few classes went by and no one said anything about the glorious footwear that I had graced them with. Finally we got down to music class. The chairs were arranged in a horseshoe shape, perfect for me to stick my feet out to show off these kicks. One of the girls in my class had just gotten Janet Jackson’s Control tape and we all sat and listened to “Nasty.” The song ended and Beth Griffen noticed my kicks, and like a punch in the face said, “look at Chris Neher’s shoes!!!”

I looked down. All of a sudden my high top navy moon boots with three Velcro straps didn’t seem that cool anymore. “I had to wear them,” I exclaimed. “I got my tennis shoes all wet.” Some kids snickered, some made moon boot comments, some didn’t care.

When I got home that afternoon, I took my not so sweet boots off and put them in the storage room where we kept our winter gear. We had once had a torrid love affair, me and sweet boots, but we would never be the same. A year later my mom got rid of them. I couldn’t have grown out of them fast enough.