Shoes of 9/11

Shoes of 9/11
by Billie Kelpin Pagliolo Olmon

I never understood why my mother would sing it to me night after night--the song about the shoes. I don't think she really understood why herself. I must have been only four or five. "But, honey, if it makes you cry...." "No, Mommy, please, just one more time." And she'd lean on her elbow against a propped up pillow and watch me as she sang, "Come now mother bathe my forehead, for I'm growing very weak," The little boy in the song was dying. "Give my toys to all my playmates, but put my little shoes away." For more than 50 years I've wondered about that song, where it came from, why my mother would have sung it to a four year old, and why a four year old would have wanted to hear it. It was one of those quirky kind of family mysteries a person wants to solve. "Soon the baby will be larger and they'll fit his tiny feet. Won't he look so handsome mother as he marches down the street. You will do this mother, won't you...put my little shoes away? Give my toys to all my playmates, but put my little shoes away."

I didn't think about this song on the day that I bought the white tennis shoes in November in New York in 2001. My feet had been aching from the high-heeled black boots I had worn so my daughter would be proud of me as I visited her in Manhattan. It was the Thanksgiving weekend. She was just about to leave on tour for a Broadway musical and was doing what all actresses do between gigs--working some short-term job, this time selling tutu's at a pre-Christmas shopping boutique in Grand Central Station. There was time to kill while she worked, so I took the "four" train by myself down to Fulton Street and started walking. I stopped off at a drug store along the way to buy some film, although I felt guilty for the purchase. I continued walking down to Battery Park. I had expected the indescribable plastic-metallic smell in the air, but I didn't expect the silence. It felt like I was walking inside of a painting, like the feeling you get when watching Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George." I didn't want to ask where to go; it felt sacrilegious. So I just turned right because it seemed to be the direction I should follow for my intended purpose. A middle-aged man with a camera slung over his shoulders crossed the street a half a block in front of me. He was walking quite purposely and a teenage boy, who I assumed was his son, followed behind him as if being pulled reluctantly along by an invisible rope. The man knew where he was going and I followed a few feet behind the boy. The three of us now wove in and out of ziz-zag alleyways until we became part of a line of others walking single file next to a street open to massive pipes that ran underground. I knew I was going in the right direction.

By this time, my high-heeled black boots felt like vices tightening around the bones of my feet; I was sorry the aching was distracting me from the reason I had come. Still, I was able to take notice of the buildings standing tall and straight and unharmed, and it seemed strange that that they should be doing so. I had never walked around this area on other trips to New York and I was surprised to find a clothing store amid the office and bank buildings. It was one of those cheap basement types, and it felt incongruent and almost surrealistic that it should be open as if nothing had happened. I walked in, hoping to find something that would take the ache away. There wasn't much on the shoe shelves actually--one pair of this, one pair of that-- one of a style in various sizes. I was wishing there would be some kind of comfortable tennis shoe--perhaps even in white, my favorite in a sneaker. "Why would there be any here," I thought. "It's November and well past the tennis shoe season and long before spring." And then I saw them--one pair of tennis shoes-only one --white...and in my size. They were made of cheap vinyl but had a unique zipper opening so they might pass as not so bargain basement-y. They were amazingly comfortable when I tried them on and for $11.99, I would take them. The clerk let me throw my boots in a bag and rang up the shoes. I didn't know what to say to her--about the attack. I asked her if she had been working that day and she looked at me, almost insolently I thought, and then answered with a curtness I sensed came from "tourist" overload, "Of course."

I sputtered in response, "I can't imagine what it must have been like," and was surprised that I could feel tears starting to well up in my eyes. She must have noticed, for her gaze softened, and she muttered a barely audible and reluctantly obliging "Happy Thanksgiving" as I left the store. I walked out into the store and into the still silent group of people passing on the sidewalk. Everyone was looking towards the left, and they filled up the middle of the street. Without words, or direction, they knew what to do and I followed them. I made my way up to the yellow barricade and when a man in front of me turned to leave, I filled his place as if we were exchanging places to view a coffin at a wake. There were probably two people standing to my right; I paid little notice. I snapped a picture of the jagged shell, paused in silence, and then let the person I knew was behind me take my place. I took another picture of the National Guardsman and policeman standing together - just because - and walked back to the "four" train in my new shoes.

I was glad for the shoes on my trip home to Minnesota. Security had been tightened at the airports and the shoes were serving me well as I stood in line with two hundred other people waiting to board flights out of Newark. I didn't think much about the shoes when I got back home; I wore them to work on casual day and around the house. I know I was wearing them the evening I walked in the living room where the TV was on. It was another interview of another New York fireman still working after so many weeks amid the rubble of the World Trade Center. The interviewer asked him if the task was wearing on him and he responded, "Yes." I stood and watched as he added, "It's the little things that get to you...finding a pair of women's high heeled shoes..."

I don't know how many days passed before I thought of them together--my mother's song, my new shoes, the fireman's comments. It was my need to make them come together that let the arbitrary take on meaning. Humankind is interesting in that respect. Inanimate objects become symbols and the symbols take on power and the power overcomes powerlessness. For years I had tried to analyze what had motivated my mother to sing "Put My Little Shoes Away" to me at such a young age. But sometimes when reasons are elusive and the puzzle has no solution, our minds, craving logical explanation and meaning, create our own reasons. I decided on the meaning that I now wished to attach to the song. I decided on the meaning that I wanted to attach to my new shoes. The song was in my life, I determined, not for me to focus on the little boy, and thus my own mortality, but to understand, instead, the symbol of the shoes. What if, as for the little brother in the song, the shoes I now wear are not really mine? What if a woman very much like me, given a few more hours or a few more days, might have walked the short distance from the World Trade Center to that basement store during her lunch hour? Perhaps her feet would have been aching from her high-heeled shoes, and perhaps, like me, she would pick the cheap white vinyl shoes to wear back to the office for the same reasons I picked them. I choose to imagine that these were her shoes and I want to wear them for her . I want to feel obligated to the shoes and to her just because I am here and she is not; just because 'the powerful play goes on and I may contribute a verse"-- perhaps a verse she would have wanted to contribute. I want to believe there were aspects of her character that were better than mine-- a mind that worked faster, a will that was stronger. My shoes (her shoes) are a symbol to me now of her unfinished work, her unrealized dreams-- and of mine. They are a symbol to me of the con-struction that needs to counterbalance de-struction. As time dilutes the horror of September 11, the ordinariness of daily life dilutes the feeling that swept over me when I first felt that the shoes were not mine and I struggle to get it back because I know that feeling has power. Psychologists may argue that we can make changes only for ourselves, but the layman knows that the most consequential changes in the world are the ones we make for a higher purpose. I've seen relics of the saints - pieces of cloth of some supposed martyr that Sister Mary Margaret passed around in fourth grade. I choose these shoes to be a relic...sacred...powerful - to propel me to work more than I would have without them - to accomplish something more than I might have -to contribute a verse I might not have written. We live by symbols--we die for symbols. It feels symmetrical to believe the song my mother sang, my shoes, and a soul unknown to me, might all be connected - and more spiritual and symbolic than any relic I've ever touched.