A friend of mine was driving past a cemetery with his 4-year-old daughter one day and noticed her looking closely at it. \u201cDo you know what that place is?\u201d the dad asked. \u201cOh sure,\u201d she answered casually. \u201cThat\u2019s where the dead guys live.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kids do seem to have an uncanny awareness of things most adults figure they wouldn\u2019t have a clue about. That\u2019s why I recently assembled a group of neighbor kids to get their take on the greatest of modern-day mysteries \u2013 one that probably began shortly after Alexander Graham Bell came up with his big invention. I\u2019m not talking about the telephone specifically, but the telephone wire. Not only did the invention of the wire make long-distance phone communication possible, but it also made possible the phrase, \u201cWire, wire; pants on fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
But those wires also are the resting places for a phenomenon so pervasive, so vexing and \u2013 well, so dumb \u2013 that I have tossed and turned over it for years. Mostly I have tossed salad and turned eggs over easy, but still I have been perplexed.<\/p>\n
I am talking, of course, about the question of why \u2013 from sea to shining sea, and all across our fruited plain \u2013 shoes are seen hanging from telephone lines!<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t pretend you haven\u2019t noticed them. They\u2019re everywhere, except Mercer Island. The shoes range from Chuck Taylors to Keds, tied together and dangling like participles. Why are they there? Why are they there? Why did I repeat the preceding question twice?<\/p>\n
I know I\u2019m not the first to wonder about the suspended shoes enigma. There are endless discussions in books and on Web sites. There are probably think tanks puzzling over it at this very moment. No one actually seems to have ever witnessed someone throwing the shoes up there. They just seem to be there, simply appearing one day as suddenly as a long-lost cousin after you\u2019ve won the lottery.<\/p>\n
Tennis shoes are almost always the footgear of choice, although there have been reported sightings of laced wedgies, wingtips and loafers. A guy in Anchorage claims to have once seen a pair of snowshoes hanging off a power line, although he later admitted he was rather inebriated, so they could have been tennis rackets.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s the deal with the dangling footwear? Urban mythology offers endless theories:<\/p>\n
\u2022 They\u2019re put there by farmers to scare crows away.<\/p>\n
\u2022 They\u2019re put there by crows to further annoy farmers.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Tennis shoes hanging on a power line mean you can buy drugs there.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Tennis shoes hanging on a power line mean you can buy sole inserts there.<\/p>\n
\u2022 They\u2019re a gang sign.<\/p>\n
\u2022 They\u2019re a podiatrist gang sign.<\/p>\n
I thought the neighbor kids might have better hunches than any of those, so I recently brought a bunch of them together over Mountain Dew and Pop Tarts to discuss the hanging-shoe question. Here are some of the actual thoughts the youngsters offered:<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad says that Nordstrom puts them there so people will subconsciously think about buying shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen shoes are really, really smelly, the angels put them up there so they can air out for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople hang the shoes on the telephone wires so that birds can see the wires better and won\u2019t fly into them and get shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCrooks throw them there to get the police mad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSome guys are just too lazy to put their old shoes in the garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy brother threw his shoes up there so the dog doo would wear off.\u201d<\/p>\n
One kid, Justin, had this notion: \u201cThey\u2019re all that\u2019s left of sky divers. If you could get those shoes down, you\u2019d find that the feet are still in there, too.\u201d Justin\u2019s parents are worried about him.<\/p>\n
Maybe the truth will never be known, but I think Sean might be on the right track: \u201cPeople throw the shoes up there because hats and underpants won\u2019t stay.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pat Cashman is a writer, actor and public speaker. He can be reached at pat@patcashman.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend of mine was driving past a cemetery with his 4-year-old daughter one day and noticed her looking closely at it. \u201cDo you know what that place is?\u201d the dad asked. \u201cOh sure,\u201d she answered casually. \u201cThat\u2019s where the dead guys live.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2134"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}