“Mom, have you seen my tennis shoes?” I said from out in the garage while she was in the kitchen frying breaded perch caught in Lake Michigan.

“No Carson, I haven’t seen those smelly old things, but I bet they’re right in front of you, getting ready to jump up and bite you.”

I looked down, and sure enough they were several feet in front of me. How did she know? Did she have ESP? Truth is things were simpler back then, with less choices in life. We could ride our bikes all over the town all day in the summer, but we didn’t have the choice to call our parents on a cell phone and tell them we would be late because of course, that technology didn’t exist. No, our only choice was to come home at dinner time, or somehow find a pay phone if we got in trouble, problem is, we never had a dime in our pockets because if we made ten cents by turning in 5 glass pop bottles we found in empty parking lots for deposit, we spent all 10 cents on baseball cards. Now, back to tennis shoes.

I had two pairs of shoes: tennis shoes for almost everything and my Sunday best for well, you know — Sunday. I don’t remember those too well. But the tennis shoes were my all – purpose foot protectors, holes worn by big toes and plenty of coats of dirt and mud. Sometimes we called them gym shoes when we went to gym because our gym drill instructor didn’t like the word tennis. And of course, we called them gym shoes because both his little fingers were broken and curved out and we didn’t want to do push – ups. But after we left gym class we wore our tennis shoes to pay playground baseball, playground tackle football, going to Boy Scout camp, running around the neighborhood playing ditch and of course, to ride our bikes with baseball cards clipped with wooden clothes line hangars to our bike spokes so that they produced that glorious sputtering sound when we rode our bikes behind the large cloud of DDT spray behind the pickup truck that went around all the neighborhood protecting us from those nasty mosquitos.

We didn’t need electronics because we didn’t have much technology except for a TV. And Sunday nights we would watch Lassie and Saturday mornings we would not want to miss the Andy Griffith show. The Monkeys came on I think at 8 pm but my parents wouldn’t let me watch them because they had long hair and were wild musicians, or something, I don’t know. Sometimes though, they let me stay up late and watch the Man From Uncle with Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. I liked Ilya because he was cool and tough, but Solo I didn’t like because he kissed too many girls.

Some years later I joined the high school cross country team and got my third pair of shoes: running spikes with the special advantage is that the spikes were long and sharp and were good weapons. Then later during the cross – country season, some company started selling shoes with a red question mark laying on its’ side without a dot, pasted on the side of the bright white shoes with large fat cushions. That was the Nike Cortez, and I soon found I needed this pair to run long distance on the road and that tennis shoes would no longer suffice for this purpose. Then when I started winning indoor track races, I needed a pair of blue velvet Onitsuka Tiger shoes, and they became my good luck shoes, never allowing me to suffer defeat indoors.

And yes, I played some tennis, with my tennis shoes, finally, and it was a nice sport, and I was finally using the correctly named shoes for the correct sport. But, turns out the only thing I liked about tennis was that they used the word love a lot and well you know hot chicks played tennis, so that came in handy. So, then I took up golf in my tennis shoes, until years later I realized that if I only had golf cleats I would’ve been able to drive the ball 300 yards.

But now they call tennis shoes sneakers. Tell you what, I would never be caught dead wearing “sneakers” because well, although they don’t make noise and you can sneak up on people, but everyone knows Indians were able to sneak up on people without sneakers. They wore moccasins. Not only that, it’s a dumb name that I thought only Cape Cod Sailboat enthusiasts wore while flipping sails in the wind equipped with perfectly white sweaters. Now sneakers have become complicated with Plimsoll sneakers, whatever they are, Classic Converse sneakers, high – top basketball sneakers, walking shoes, running shoes and cross trainers. In fact, some people wear sneakers with blue blazers and to work as well as play without turning heads. Hard to believe.

Tennis shoes or gym shoes have now become much more complex. In fact, they can be bought using an app on your smart phone. So, although there was a long phase of my life when I ran competitively in high school and college and I only wore running shoes, exclusively, now that my knees no longer allow me to pound the roads, I am back to wearing what I call tennis shoes or gym shoes no matter how many people laugh at me.

But I will never wear sneakers.

© SRCarson 2018