The Lost Shoe

Sitting along side Country Club Road, just off US 220, lies a yellow and black shoe.

It has been there for several months, and I only see it when I am in the passenger side of the car. As we drive by, I see it sitting forlornly in the dirt, unclaimed and unloved.

I always wonder how articles of clothing end up away from their mates and owners. Did this shoe fall off a moving truck? Is someone who now lives elsewhere missing it, wondering what became of their favorite sole?

Were two young people arguing in a back seat, and one, highly vexed, heaved a shoe at the other, sending the missile out the window and into the road, where it was hit by a car that sent it careening into the mud and grass of the roadside?

Perhaps someone was riding a bike and his foot slipped, and he was so aggravated that he pulled his shoe off then and there, and abandoned it in order to pedal home barefooted. But then what would have become of the mate?

Who bought this shoe? Did some mother lovingly choose this shoe for a wayward son, hoping that if she made this purchase her young lad would wise up and suddenly stop running around with the gang on the corner because she didn't want him to be another name in the county's latest drug user round up?

Or maybe a fiancee made this purchase as a gift for a beloved, the action taking weeks as the lover thought and pondered the most perfect of presents until finally happening upon a pair of yellow and black shoes. They spoke to the lover who thought, Eureka, I have found it! And the shoes were presented with much fanfare and many kisses. And then what if the lovers quarreled, and the shoes made their way to the trash, and en route to the landfill, one fell to the pavement, a final note on a doomed relationship?

The lost shoe is no more than trash, right? Another consumer item lost to the owner, its value diminished to practically nothing because it has no mate and it's been out in the rain and probably run over by cars and trucks. Worthless.

And yet, such stories there are in singular lost shoes. Such angst and anxiety, not to mention puzzlement and bewilderment. In a single shoe there lies a world of ideas.

Worthless? I think not.

And therein lies the lesson.