On the Occasion of Laura Brown's 30th Birthday

Yesterday, Mackenzie picked up one of the small ancient red Keds on my sideboard. "Why is this here?"

"Your mother, your aunts, and your uncle each wore those shoes when their feet were that size."

"Why do you keep them here? They're old and they're dirty."

"They're not dirty. Just faded and worn out. I keep them there because they remind me of my children at a wonderful age."

"Did I wear these?"

"No, your mother wouldn't want you to wear old hand-me-down shoes. Plus, the soles are hardened and the canvas is rotted. They'd be uncomfortable, and they'd fall apart quickly."

"Maybe my daughter will wear them. You can give them to me in your will."


"I expect they'll get thrown away when I die. No one else places any value on them."


We started down the stairs. As I closed my front door, bronzed baby shoes resting on an unidentified mantle appeared immediately behind my retinas. I remembered being Mackenzie's age and asking, "Why are those shoes there?"

Someone - perhaps my mother - explained that those shoes were the first shoes that the child of the homeowners had worn, and that they were a "keepsake", whatever "keepsake" meant. I took it at that. The shoes were ordinary - not worth turning into a statue, I was certain. They looked like my younger sister Patti's shoes. Like the shoes every toddler wore. They were orthopedic-looking things, first crafted shortly after man began to walk upright. The pair on the mantle looked especially uncomfortable - being bronze. They were less-dark in the wider expanses; seams, grommets, and areas around laces were dark brown. They were ugly and mildly threatening - a punishment shoe awaiting a poorly-behaved boy like myself, perhaps?

Mackenzie moved down the treads in a zig-zaggy pattern. Watching from behind and above, I felt my face spilling into a mixing bowl of shattered smile: there is a lot that is cool about being a kid.


"You'll be dead when I have kids."


"Probably so. Or, I'll be around 80."


"About the same as dead."

Unlike some early geriatrics, I richly enjoy a well-reasoned position. "True dat, Doodler."

She opened the door and walked onto the broad sidewalk. Those old bronzed shoes . . ..


I can't place the time when I realized that those shoes were keepsakes because the parents somehow celebrated their child's first steps.


It dawned on me over time:

that the child had survived its first year, fit enough to walk;

that first steps are a new level of distancing from parents.


(This happened before I'd been introduced to metaphor.)


Soon enough, there would be a tricycle;

then, a bike;

then a car.


Shortly thereafter, only the bronzed shoes on the mantle would litter the parent-emotional curio cabinet.

Some parents mark the birth of their first child as the fulcrum of their own life experience. The shoes are not just to celebrate the child's growing, not merely reminders of a happy passage of time, not only very-personal tchotchkes. They mark the transition that changed the world.

When you first wore these shoes, Laura, they were the only kid's shoes in the house. I chose red Keds because red Keds are emblematic of childhood to me. I wished for you a childhood with quotidian emblems signifying safety and continuity, simplicity and modesty, utility and durability. I wished for you a happy succession of "Red Keds". Red Keds are an emblem of my wishes for your childhood.


Shortly after you were fitted for these shoes, Sarah joined us with colicky fanfare. By the time you were fitted for two-sizes-larger, Sarah slipped into this pair. At the changing area in the butler's pantry, I built a table with drawers beneath, with a three-inch slot between. "The Shoe Slot."

Shortly after Sarah took over these shoes, Grace dripdripdripped into our lives. In time you moved up three more sizes; Sarah moved up three sizes into your shoes; Grace put on this pair.

A brief grace period ensued.

About the time you wore your last pair of red Keds, Isaac rounded us into six. By this time, the shoe slot was filled with ten sizes of red Keds (and one pair of blue, to which you never really took).

Mackenzie opened the car door and let herself in. I joined her from the driver's side. We rode to Grace's.


The Girl is right: I'll be dead before her kid might don these ancient red Keds. But, I'm right, too: no one else places any value on them. This is the utility cycle for a pair of bronzed orthopedic kid's shoes, for a pair of red Keds, for some folk's fulcrums.

Love,



Older Holden