the shoes we wear when we are young

*not the actual shoes

i sent the following essay into sun magazine for their readers write section. the topic was 'shoes.'

I don’t remember the sound exactly. I do remember it would it came in two parts, two clicks -- like an echo. The first came as the pointed heel smacked the ground and the second as the rounded toe followed.

CLICK. click.

Something like that.

I also remember how much I loved this sound. It was the sound of my mom coming home from work. The sound of my mom’s red high heels meeting the kitchen’s tile floor.

My mom, back when I was a young, tow-headed boy in Spiderman underwear, had a pretty impressive shoe collection. Towers of plastic, see-through drawers climbed up one side of her walk-in closet. In each little box was a pair of shoes -- usually heels -- lying aside one another, almost like a couple sleeping .

When I was about three or so, I started making daily trips to her closet, finding the drawer with her two, candy-apple red high heels, slipping my too-small feet into them and stomping around the kitchen.

It became such a habit that on a visit from North Dakota, my grandpa, a farmer with far more tractors than shoes, was treated to an impromptu drag show of sorts. Of course, red high heels are not the sort of footwear a man like my grandpa would expect to see on his son’s son.

“Little boys don’t wear heels,” he told me and my mom. “It’s queer.”

“I think he likes the sound,” my mom said.

A day later, my grandpa handed me a box -- “an early birthday present,” I think he called it. I opened it up, and inside I found two card board-colored cowboy boots. I pulled them on and made a few laps around the kitchen.

There was something missing. Maybe the click wasn’t loud enough or the rhythm was off or the color wasn’t right. Maybe it wasn’t any of these things.

As soon as my grandpa left the house, though, I went about pulling the boots off and stepping into my mom’s well-worn heels.