Shoes and Thanks

Ever see a lone shoe at the side of the road and wonder how it got there? Passenger riding with a foot out the window and the shoe blew off? Kids playing tricks on each other. Flushed out of airline toilets? Fallen off feet of riders of passing horses? Grown from a piece of lost shoelace? Well, I tried to abandon a pair once on Highway 1 just south of where it joins up with Highway 11 at the southern edge of North Dakota.
In high school advanced biology class, we dissected baby sharks. In between class sessions, we kept them suspended by a string in a drum of smelly liquid. Some of it would splash on the floor where you could not help but walk in it as you retrieved or stashed your eviscerated shark carcass. During this process, the gooey rubber of my trendy mid-70's wedge platform shoes absorbed the horrible dead sea life smell. It was gross, disgusting to carry that smell around with me all day every day.
One morning, leaving for school wearing snow boots, I set those shoes on top of the car to load other things, maybe my books or a gym bag, and it occurred to me that if I 'forgot' them up there . . . so I did.
I spent the day in glee that I had 'ditched' the nasty things . . . only to arrive home that afternoon to find that my dear uncle had seen them on the side of the road and rescued not one but both of them for me and taken them to the farm.
There was a nasty gouge in one of the trendy fashionable wedge heels and of course they still stank to high heaven, but my mother made me keep wearing them anyway. I hated those shoes. I bet they are still there in some dark corner of some closet in her house. They will never go away.