Recently, archaeologists in Europe made an exciting discovery: a two-thousand year old shoe. They were beyond thrilled to make such a find; in fact, they were probably almost as thrilled as the person who lost it would have been to find it two thousand years ago, or rather, almost as thrilled as that person’s mother would have been, because of course it must have been a child who lost it. Who else besides a child can lose one shoe? (Granted, there have been times when, due to celebratory occasions like New year’s Eve, the last day of finals, and finding a ten dollar bill in the pocket of an old pair of jeans, that I have managed to lose both of my shoes on the way home from the bar, but as for losing just one?-never.) No, it takes a certain kind of person to be able to walk home in the snow with only one snow boot on: it takes a child; or maybe it takes my child–I don’t know.
I do know that when I was flipping through a parenting magazine last week I noticed there were not one but two articles on how to keep from losing either one sock or one mitten–there was even an article tucked away in the back pages about how not to lose the sheets in a matching sheet set–but, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing about how not to lose just one shoe. This would probably explain why my son, Clyde, is often the only child at daycare wearing one flip-flop and one high top sneaker. Now, personally, I considered the day to be a sartorial success if he manages to be wearing one left shoe and one right shoe (extra points for being on the correct feet), but judging from the funny looks he often receives from the other parents, sartorial success might be measured differently in different households.
Of course, that was something I had pretty much figured out long before the “sock-saving” article came along; reading it only confirmed what I had long suspected to be true. For one thing, this article suggested that mothers hang on to “loner” socks for a maximum of three loads of laundry; if the mate didn’t show up in the allotted time frame, then the mother should simply throw the lone wolf sock away. Throw it away? A perfectly good sock with no holes, no foxtails embedded in the cuff, and no coating of funky green fuzz from being stored, wet, in the bottom of a backpack with half a bag of cheetos and a spilled Gatorade for an entire school year? If I had access to a gem such as that I might mount it and hang it above my mantelpiece; I might place it in the cornerstone of the new courthouse as a time capsule; I might even cryogenically freeze it and store it in the same vault with Ted Williams’ head; the one thing I certainly would not do, however, would be to throw it away.
We must live in quite the culture of excess when parenting magazines are seriously suggesting throwing out perfectly good clothes simply because they don’t conform to some arbitrary standard of couture symmetry. I’m sure that the mother 2000 years ago didn’t throw out the remaining shoe when her little cave child came limping home in the snow trailing his wooly mammoth coat on the ground and handing her his two-week old stone tablet announcing that the sign-up meeting for the Sabre Tooth Cubs was tonight.
In fact, I’ll bet she didn’t even get him a new shoe to match the old one; to this day his descendants probably still don’t wear two shoes at a time in his sainted honor. Well, at least that would explain my children.