Forgetfulness

If you’re comfortable being barefoot, sometimes you forget you took your shoes off, which can be amusing. One morning I couldn’t find my sandals in our room in our South Dakota lodge, as we were getting ready for the day. I realized I had slipped them off in the lounge/lobby area of the lodge the evening before, as we relaxed. When we visited some of the lodge’s gift shops, I was still barefoot. That morning, as I tried to find my sandals, I found them, still in the lounge room, at the cozy chair where I had sat.

At one of my schools, a classmate kicked off her shoes for some social time that we all were having on the lawn of the dorms. She didn’t retrieve them; they remained the next day, placed together on the dorm sidewalk where she’d left them.

One weekend morning, not so long ago, I decided to do some writing on my laptop at the coffee shop. Getting a large black coffee, I set up at an outside table and spent a peaceful hour or so, trying to catch a current of creativity where the writing would do itself, but mostly I waded in the shallows, so to speak. Still, I felt nicely comfortable with my toes on the cool concrete beneath the chair, and I mostly forgot about it, as if I were in my backyard. When I remembered, I felt happy.

In childhood, you go about your day’s pleasures and not think about shoes unless your parents insist on it. On a particular day during grade school years, I walked to the park, and it was a while before I realized, Oh, I’ve no shoes on. I only remembered because I stepped on some thistles. I walked home, and my father was alarmed to see me returning to the park with his long, sharp pruning shears in hand.

We adults no longer set out barefoot with the goal of a fun and unstructured day, forgetful of our unprotected feet until something reminds us.