weirdly fond

Greg Fallis

I bought these shoes for one reason: they cost US$12.00. I was at the Dread Wal-Mart to buy some golf balls and happened by the shoe aisle and there they were. Twelve dollars. For a pair of shoes. They were almost certainly made in some overseas sweat shop by oppressed non-union workers laboring under wretched conditions for almost no money.

To buy them would be to participate in their oppression. I knew that. And knowing it, I bought them anyway. I told myself I'd use them for yardwork (and I have), and I told myself buying one pair of shoes was an infinitesimal act of oppression (which it is and it isn't), but mostly I bought them because I was fascinated by the fact that a person could buy a pair of actual shoes for only twelve dollars.

I figured they'd fall apart in a couple of months.

That was a couple years ago. I wear them like slippers now, almost every day. I still use them for yardwork. I wear them when I'm cycling (they slide in and out of the toe traps so easily). They're falling apart, to be sure, and they have no tread whatsoever, but those are still the original shoe strings. I've grown weirdly fond of them.

And every day I put them on, I think about the poor bastards who made them. I've grown weirdly fond of them too.

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