Shoes Do The Talking

When I was in Florence, Italy two years ago, I was really, really depressed, for good reason.  But that's another story, probably a book.  A particularly striking memory was sitting outside a laundromat, waiting for my clothes to dry.  As crowds pushed down the cobbled alley passing for a street, and my friends shooed Gypsies away with shouts and hand gestures, I aimed my Nikon Cool Pix at people from the knees down.  Changing the different settings I was able to capture hundreds of shoes in stride, people moving toward something but all I could know of them if I looked back at those photos was their shoes.  

It soon became a thing with me, to shoot pictures of people from the knees down, lest they feel self-conscious or lest I steal their soul without their permission.  You can tell a lot about someone from their shoes, what they buy, how they care for them, how they wear them, if they have any sense of style or care about how they look.

I have been a shoe nut for many years, collecting them since I was in high school.  I spent most of my babysitting money buying shoes to match my outfits.  We had very little money but having cool shoes was somehow my way of keeping up appearances and I guess it stayed that way until recently when I no longer needed to clip-clop around the Capitol's marble floors in three-inch heels because now I work from home.

Over the years I must have purchased hundreds and hundreds of shoes, really nice ones.  Everything from designer sling pumps to hiking boots for the now-famous Eco-Nazi Boot Camp Trek from Hell (another story, starring the Most Reverend Jeannie Shaw-Connelly and seven women who would dare the wilderness of Yosemite without her permission to use toilet paper lest we despoil the environment.)

In my experience shoes do a lot of the talking, they can tell a story or a lie, they can serve to remind you about what you were doing when you wore them, the heads you might have turned or the compliments..."Nice kicks," I used to hear frequently, mainly because I worked at making the shoes work for me.

So when I got home from Italy I loaded my photos into the computer, to take their place along with 17 years of other photos, data, articles, work, writing, chronicles of my life, and there it all sat, mucho megabytes, unbacked, until last August when the trusty MacBook's hard drive crashed.  Leaving nothing to grab on to, to look at, to recall or to take pride in.  Gone, pffft, like that!  

Beyond the obvious lesson of backing up, there's something to be said for starting over.  Here's the start of a new collection, taken in the foyer of a movie theatre on San Pablo Avenue in Albany, CA, just before sitting down in comfy couches, to drink red wine and watch the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men.