January 21, 2010
My shoes have started squeaking. I can’t figure out why this is, although figuring out why they’re squeaking isn’t nearly as important as finding a way to stop it. And it’s not even both shoes. Specifically it’s the left shoe. I’m left-handed and, although I’ve never tried to write with my feet (not on a regular basis, anyway) I’m pretty sure I’m left-footed as well. So while I really want to keep shoes on both my feet, I think if I had to give one up it would be the right shoe. And the squeaking is really annoying too. If it were just a tiny little squeak it would be one thing but this sounds like I’ve got a dog toy stuck to the bottom of my shoe. People can tell I’m coming from about a mile away, although not many people know who I am so they’re probably all wondering who in the neighborhood has a dog toy. Maybe they don’t care, but I care. There’s a reason I wear sneakers. I’m not a burglar or anything like that, but if I wanted to draw attention to myself I’d strap on one of those one-man-band outfits–the one where you have a giant drum on your back, some cymbals between your knees, and an oboe attached to your tonsils, in case you get tired of playing John Philip Souza songs and decide to play Le Sacre du Printemps instead. I wear sneakers so I can walk around without drawing attention.
Maybe this goes back to my childhood when my parents moved into a house where my bedroom was right over theirs. The advantage was that I could hear my parents coming so that I always had plenty of time to shove the book I was reading under my pillow and pretend to be asleep if they decided to come check on me. The disadvantage was I couldn’t cross my room to turn on my television. There was a squeaky spot right in the middle of the floor in my room and there was no way around it. My parents probably had no idea that the floor squeaked, but to me it sounded like it reverberated through the entire house. This problem could have been solved if they’d gotten me a television with a remote control, but I considered myself lucky to have a black and white television that only got three channels. But late at night Benny Hill came on one of those channels. My mother always said I shouldn’t watch Benny Hill and, in retrospect, she was right. Watching Benny Hill warps your mind so that you think it’s funny to slap your grandfather on the head repeatedly. It’s not funny, and all it really does is upset everyone else who’s at the funeral, but that’s another story. The only way I’ve found to stop my shoes from squeaking is to walk on grass, but it’s been really rainy lately. Maybe it’s the humidity that’s caused my shoes to start squeaking. I’ve noticed that humidity can affect a lot of things. My hair curls more when it’s humid, for instance, and when it’s cold and dry outside I’ve noticed clothes get dry in the dryer a lot faster. I think this is why my jeans always feel tighter in the winter, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that when it gets cold I start craving foods like sticks of butter dipped in gravy. Because the ground is so wet and muddy, though, I don’t really want to walk in the grass. Especially with just one shoe on my right foot.
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