Summer Shoes

Summer shoes was what we called them. Summer shoes, elsewhere known as…KEDS; black and white canvas high-tops with the big rubber seal on the ankle, proclaiming KEDS. As a kid I took this to mean Kids Extralegal Defense of Summer, or perhaps Kinetic Energy Device of Summer, or else some strange ethnic spelling of KIDS. Why else would they put a big round declaration on the ankle of a cheap canvas shoe unless it meant something vital to nature, especially to a farmkid, as is a different kind of animal. I have researched this intensively and preliminary data suggests farmkids are definitely not of the usual species, nor do they share the same genetic markers as other kids. They are modified, more precisely transfigured by a high dose of hay wagons, known to be occasionally lethal. Same goes for the cucumber patch, the calf pen, here to add the cosmic radiation of a potato shed well-known to screw-up genes.

The day the school bell rang out the close of the classroom was the birthday of our kind, and a knowing mother who presented each of her children at this moment of expectation with a shoe box. KEDS did not come wrapped in tissue paper like the box of church shoes. That’s what we called them in our house, church shoes. I hated those shoes, never ever polished well enough, never worn long enough to limber up and to actually fit the foot of the person they imprisoned. They creaked quite the like of walking around in miniature coffins. Matching exactly what they felt like on the feet. I knew at the time church shoes actually oozed embalming fluid into their victims. That I came eventually to distance myself from Christianity has probably less to do with any doctrinal insolvency than those darn dead shoes.

I have on occasion reprised the ingredients of our mother’s love, how she could cook the pants off any other competitor including Paul Bunyan and Hercules. How she hummed at her dish sink; people don’t do that any more, hum. I take this as a sign of moral decline that ear-buds and i-Tunes cannot alleviate. It was those summer KEDS that led me to know the true charity of that woman. That rubber-scented box of new KEDS was akin to the discovery of the new continent by Columbus or Leif Eriksson, except this the continent of KEDS, the Promised Land as bestowed by summer shoes. The equivalent for a kid of being issued a six-gun, cartridge belt and a set of Festus Hagen spurs except our arsenal of summer were those KEDS. Tree climbing, stream jumping, mile running, barn busting, hay baling KEDS.

It was, of course, shameless compensation for what enormity our youthful lives were put. We worked at this early age as adults; responsible, steady, dutiful, day-long, week-long, summer-long. Our commission fee, those KEDS, at the time it seemed equitable and fair enough. I still think it was fair, considering the purchase power of those summer shoes.

By the simple causation of putting on those KEDS were we propelled into the sylvannia of summer. Before we were owned by those oxblood heavy-duty farm shoes, what the Irish call brogans, bullet-proof, cow-proof, manure-proof, and heavy as a Sherman tank. Don’t get me wrong, farm boots are great shoes; I am wearing a pair at this very moment. Storm proof, fire proof, long-day proof, apocalypse-proof. These shoes that were part of our exoskeleton, never mind most human beings don’t have or require an exoskeleton. They are what hold you up when your bones go soft. Ever notice how farmers don’t wear hard hats, instead hard shoes, these of similar protection, as if what is vital and needs protection isn’t the skull and brain but the feet. However awkward this sounds it is as precise a defense as the vocation requires. Where being smart sometimes is a lot less vital to survival than staying put and staying at it.

The KEDS sensation, as I recall it, was like being on an instant given the flying cape of Superman or the leopard print jungle shorts of Tarzan. A kid so equipped able immediately to leap tall buildings or in our case barns, silos and corn cribs. We were seldom paid for our labor on the farm, least that is my memory, but we did get KEDS. In retrospect it may have been a slight under-estimate of our value but this does not fully account for that experience of throwing off the weight and cares and impositions of the world. Wearing KEDS for the next three delicious months was a canvas/rubber invocation of pure animal zeal. Like Viagra for the feet, if you don’t mind the awkward comparison. Rocket-propelled comes to mind, if also wings, magic brooms, capes, wizard wands. As a farmkid I would have spit in the ear of Harry Potter as just another ultra-clean city kid snorting magic and pathetic potions to contrive their make-believe world. Ours was not make-believe, instead the magic was real, no hocus-pocus required, our new velocity was measurable, no broom, no oath uttered, just the adroit addition of canvas and rubber.

I now realize what our mother gave us wasn’t those KEDS but the innate pleasure of being a kid, to run and jump and incise and conjoin with the world around us. A conspiracy it was of course, our lives ever after enmeshed to the native. At its heart a rotten dirty trick, in lieu of real wages we got KEDS and a lifetime entwined with the land. Our mama did not allow us a Mohawk haircut, neither moccasins nor loincloths, but those KEDS came close.