If you were like me as a kid, you wore your new shoes straight out of the store – an early exercise in instant gratification – nimbly negotiating the suddenly apparent minefield of chewing-gum blobs and flyblown dog pies. Nothing was ever more quickly forgotten than your old pair, now ingloriously stashed away in a box your mother carried. You wanted the world to see your shoes, smart and shiny as newly minted coins, but you were anxious to avoid the worst tragedy that might befall such fresh acquisitions – a careless swipe by a passing stranger, leaving a deep and indelible scar across the sheen.
Then you took them off at home and examined them from every angle, flexing the sole, inhaling lungfuls of that leathery or rubbery new-shoe smell. They slept beside you that first night. As the days passed, the shoes lost their novelty and began acquiring the telltale creases that marked them as uniquely yours, but then you also began to care for them as you would for the rest of their shoe-life, ripping up an old sando and dipping your shrouded fingers into the biton and the jobus (Joe Bush dye, get it?), turning generous dollops of wax into glossy swirls, putting the shoes aside to dry for a minute, then brushing and rubbing the leather into a fine polish.
Rubber shoes and sneakers got the toothbrush treatment. They were all made out of sturdy canvas; leather and rubber – patrician and plebeian, the one and the other – were still years away from being glued together in the same shoe. That canvas got dirty and smelly quickly enough, so you spent a Saturday morning soaking them in a pail or a basin of water before scrubbing them like crazy with laundry soap, using last year’s toothbrush. Wasn’t it magic to see all that mud desert the fabric, and wasn’t it even more amazing to see how squeaky white the shoes got under the sun?
I suppose I was looking for such ancient pleasures when I set out, just before Christmas, to get a new pair of rubber shoes to replace the Adidas that I’d bought, hmm, about six years ago and hardly ever used. I think you know how it goes: Every few years, you’re seized by a fit of physical fitness – or more accurately, the awareness of it – usually after a bacchanalian bout with lechon and morcon (all those deadly —on words: Lechon, morcon, jamon, camaron) – and you realize, of course, that the path to physical fitness begins, must begin, with a new pair of rubber shoes. (And what’s wrong with the old ones? Well, they just seem to lack that certain zing, that affirmation of resolve, that sense of investment – in other words, they’re suddenly, incontrovertibly ugly.)
To be honest about it, my Adidas still looked new – and why shouldn’t they, since I put them away a few weeks after I bought them? I had no plans of replacing them – I swear! – and I looked forward to many hours and many miles of employing them in the service of my gut-reduction program (which was, come to think of it, also the original reason why I’d bought them in 1996). We’ve just moved, as you know, into a house on the UP campus, and all these tree-lined walks seemed to be telling me something that suspiciously sounded like "Exercise!" So I unearthed the Adidas, tidied them up, stuck my feet in them, and took a couple of baby steps outside my door – only to discover something about materials science that I never knew before: Rubber deteriorates to a degree directly commensurate to the period of its immobility. In other words, as soon as I took a step, my shoes literally crumbled under my feet, the rubber coming off the soles in powdery chunks! It was as fascinating as it was horrifying. One minute I had a smashingly smart pair of shoes, ready to take me 10 laps around the Academic Oval, and the next minute I was staring at sorry shreds. And so my mini-marathon came to grief (much, I suppose, to my secret relief).
Now I had to seek worthy replacements, and I proceeded to reconnoiter the malls for the exact same pair that had died on me, recalling how difficult it had been, years earlier, to find a perfect fit. They were, of course, nowhere to be found, even among the new Adidas. I realized that shoe designers had been as busy as chimpanzees on steroids these past six years, turning out creations that looked more suited for framing rather than wanton abuse on some muddy track. Almost invariably, they came in supple and colorful leather, fused with hi-tech plastics, sporting racy swirls and stripes suggesting the reined-in power of pumas, cheetahs, and other denizens of the Olympic jungle. And they bore prices to match, some of them costing the equivalent of $100 and even more.
The shoe stores themselves were a far cry from the glorified stockrooms of old Carriedo, where someone yelled out your shoe model and shoe size and a box dropped out of a hole in the ceiling two minutes later. Today the athletic shoe store didn’t sell just shoes; it sold a lifestyle, an image of the fat and balding baby boomer as David Beckham. Rubber is cheap, but image – well, what price fantasy?
Now, I have a thing about personal accessories like pens, glasses, and watches, believing that you shouldn’t skimp on the quality of the implements you’ll use and work with everyday (my transparent excuse for splurging on a beautiful old Oris mechanical wristwatch for my 50th birthday, which diminishes my productivity every time I sneak a glance at it). But watches are jewelry, and shoes are, well, footwear, especially the athletic kind; I could not, in all conscience, plunk half a month of my UP prof’s pay down on a pair of soon-to-be smelly sneakers.
Why not, I thought, go for plain-jane canvas-top rubber shoes, a couple of pairs of which I thought I saw on the racks but didn’t deign to give a second look; surely these discarded designs cost considerably less? Not! As their price tags painfully explained, these weren’t just faded, unfashionable, new-old-stock models – they were retro creations, postmodern reiterations and recuperations of one’s long-lost youth and innocence, for which you had to pay full price. They looked every bit like they’d been salvaged from a warehouse that hadn’t been opened in 20 years, but here they were, palpably featureless and frightfully expensive, like vintage wine (uhm, is that an ’82 Fred Perry?).
After about four hours of scrutinizing all the rubber shoes in northern Metro Manila, and after finally admitting that my ideal canvas, cheap, and comfortable sneakers existed only on the platonic plane, I settled on a pair of gray Pumas in synthetic canvas, nothing too fancy nor too pricey, the average pair for the average Joe, which I was now resigned to being.
I put them on and took them out for a spin around the Oval the following Saturday; it took about an hour to negotiate the route, pausing now and then to take a shot of the fading sunlight with my digital camera and pondering the variety of bobbing posteriors in front of me. Toward the end of my run, I spotted an ice-cream vendor, and decided that my venture into physical fitness was worthy of a sweet and sloppy reward.
Those Pumas sleep under my bed, ready for when I’ll need them next. Maybe next week.