{"id":210,"date":"2005-09-09T03:16:14","date_gmt":"2005-09-09T08:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=210"},"modified":"2010-07-18T20:40:08","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T01:40:08","slug":"eric-writes-about-the-shoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=210","title":{"rendered":"Eric writes about the shoes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shoeblogs.com\/wordpress\/2005\/09\/07\/essay-contest\/\">Manolo&#8217;s<br \/>\nEssay Contest<\/a>.  The constraints &mdash; low word count, a subject<br \/>\nthat really doesn&#8217;t interest me much &mdash; appealed to me.  I<br \/>\nfigured if I could produce something interesting under those<br \/>\ncircumstances, it would be an accomplishment.<\/p>\n<p>Here it is.  You be the judge&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a geek, not a fashion plate.  I don&#8217;t think about shoes a lot,<br \/>\nbut I know what I like &#8212; and when I do think about shoes, I&#8217;m<br \/>\nprofoundly grateful for some of the changes that have come about in my<br \/>\nlifetime.  I&#8217;m thinking, more than anything else, of the way athletic<br \/>\nshoes have taken over the world.<\/p>\n<p>When I was a kid back in the 1960s and early 1970s, &#8220;shoes&#8221; still<br \/>\nmeant, basically, &#8220;hard leather oxfords&#8221;.  Ugly stiff things with a<br \/>\nhigh-maintainence finish that would scuff if you breathed on them.<br \/>\nWhat I liked was sneakers.  But in those bygone days you didn&#8217;t get<br \/>\nto wear sneakers past a certain age, unless you were doing sneaker<br \/>\nthings like playing basketball.  And I sucked at basketball.<\/p>\n<p>I revolted against the tyranny of the oxford by wearing desert boots,<br \/>\nwhich back then weren&#8217;t actually boots at all but a kind of high-top<br \/>\nshoe with a suede finish and a grip sole.  These were just barely<br \/>\nacceptable in polite company; in fact, if you can believe this, I was<br \/>\nteased about them at school.  It was a more conformist time.<\/p>\n<p>I still remember the first time I saw a shoe I actually liked and<br \/>\nwanted to own, around 1982.  It was called an Aspen, and it was built<br \/>\nexactly like a running shoe but with a soft suede upper.  Felt like<br \/>\nsneakers on my feet, looked like a grownup shoe from any distance.<br \/>\nAnd I still remember exactly how my Aspens &#8212; both of them &#8212;<br \/>\nliterally fell apart at the same moment as I was crossing Walnut<br \/>\nStreet in West Philly.  These were not well-made shoes.  I had to limp<br \/>\nhome.<\/p>\n<p>But better days were coming. In the early 1990s athletic shoes<br \/>\nunderwent a kind of Cambrian explosion, proliferating into all kinds<br \/>\nof odd styles.  Reebok and Rockport and a few other makers finally<br \/>\nfigured out what I wanted &#8212; athletic-shoe fit and comfort with a<br \/>\nsleek all-black look I could wear into a client&#8217;s office, and no<br \/>\npolishing or shoe trees or any of that annoying overhead!<\/p>\n<p>I look around me today and I see that athletic-shoe tech has taken over.<br \/>\nThe torture devices of my childhood are almost a memory.  Thank you,<br \/>\noh inscrutable shoe gods.  Thank you Rockport.  It&#8217;s not a big thing<br \/>\nlike the Internet, but comfortable un-fussy shoes have made my life<br \/>\nbetter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aa a finger exercise in writing, I decided to submit a piece to Manolo&#8217;s Essay Contest. The constraints &mdash; low word count, a subject that really doesn&#8217;t interest me much &mdash; appealed to me. I figured if I could produce something interesting under those circumstances, it would be an accomplishment. Here it is. You be&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=210\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Eric writes about the shoes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/2263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}