Shoeless

Where had she lost the shoes?  Dorothy rubbed the dust out of her eyes and considered the riddle of her stockinged feet.  Moments before she had hit the ground like a pint-sized meteor, tumbling head over heels through the buffalo grass and startling the grasshoppers into spontaneous acrobatics.  Pushing herself upright, she wondered what else was lost?  The basket, packed tight with her second best dress and the Munchkins’ farewell gifts, no longer hung on her arm.  And where was Toto? Was he already chasing Auntie Em’s chickens through the barnyard or was he wandering the desert that divided Oz and the civilized world? “Toto?” Perhaps some unused magic still clung to the cotton of her stockings and if she closed her eyes and tapped her heels, it would carry her little dog the rest of the way home.  But before she could try, the weeds rustled and parted and with a yip Toto hopped into her lap. Like Dorothy he seemed surprised by her shoeless state.  So much had depended on those silver slippers and they would have been an uncommon comfort in a land without magic. Overhead crows cawed in a cloudless sky and a feeble breeze tickled her nose with the scent of hot earth and cowpies.  “Toto,” she sighed, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Oz anymore.”  Inspired by L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz—Chapter XXIII

Dorothy Gale at sixty–my imagination flares and I see her standing in her garden at the end of the day, a figure so real she is more memory than fantasy.  Her cotton dress is faded from sun and countless washings.  Her loosely bound hair is threaded with silver.  On her feet she wears broken down boots, cracked at the heel and scuffed at the toe,  their color as gray as prairie dust. Purchased at a store in Kansas City, they were Uncle Henry’s final pair.  Dorothy knows they belong on the trash pile, but to her they are more than boots and she suspects they will be sitting in their place by the backdoor long after the wind has swept her footsteps away. Though the hard life of a Kansas homestead is etched on her face, Dorothy’s eyes still hold the wonder of a world beyond the rainbow.

Not long ago a friend asked me how I felt now that I was “really sixty”.  I sputtered about looking for an answer, searching to see if I could put a finger on my newly attained sixty-ness, but at that spot in my psyche that is essentially me, sixty hadn’t settled in.  Or maybe I had barred the door and refused it admittance.  This same friend turned sixty last April and she had faced the milestone head-on with a house full of celebrants and presents piled on her hearthstone.  But as my birthday neared, I became a master at deflecting invitations to celebrate, burying that small, hard seed of discomfort about my age ever deeper under a compost heap of denial.  Inevitably, by the time my birthday arrived I was sick, my subconscious opting for a viral infection rather than dealing with the transition out of my fifties.

If my parents were alive, they would be telling me to suck it up and get on with the business at hand.  Stoicism had been burned into their DNA by uncounted generations of Celts (mother’s side) and Vikings (father’s). It doesn’t take much to imagine my ancestors blowing raspberries at me from over the centuries.  After all, turning a year older is the work of only a moment.  As my mother always said of her own birthdays, it’s just another day.  But this year, it felt like I had arrived at the edge of a chasm and contemplating the crossing had me in despair.  What waits on the other side?

Original illustration by W.W. Denslow.

Until I reached my fifties, my life had progressed in a fairly predictable fashion.  The cultural footwear I had been fitted with at birth worked well for the standard set of heartbreaks and joys I’d encountered along my way, but they’d also adapted to the side-trips that were uniquely my own. By fifty-five, I had a reasonable, though sometimes disquieting, expectation that the rest of my life would progress not unlike my parents’ or my grandparents’.  But then everything changed. A friend of mine from Kenya recently described his community’s struggles as “a bit of hell over here” and with these simple words he elegantly captured those long periods of loss that every group, every individual, must face.  But the journey forward after we’ve survived our “bit of hell” also has its challenges.  When we return to solid ground, unshod and footsore, we realize that our before-maps no longer fit our after-topography.  Personally, to put paid to my fifties meant I had to regroup and face the years ahead without signposts or OnStar or even a yellow brick road. It seems we never stop coming-of-age.

In her memoir “Wild”, Cheryl Strayed describes the loss of one of her hiking boots off the side of a mountain on the Pacific Crest Trail.  In a moment of stark and breathtaking realization that this most precious of objects is irretrievable, she pitches its mate into the trees and stands on the trail shoeless.  Reading this, I panicked.  I panicked for Cheryl, I panicked for Dorothy and I panicked for myself. How do you take the next step when there is nothing to protect your dear and tender toes?

When Moses went tending his sheep and stumbled on the burning bush, the Lord told him to take off the shoes from his feet, because the place where he stood was holy ground (Exodus 3:5).  With nothing separating his skin and the earth, Moses was at his most vulnerable.  Vulnerability is uncomfortable and frightening and we spend our whole lives trying to escape the feeling of exposure that comes when you realize there is nothing between you and the rock-strewn unpredictability of Life.  So at sixty I stand barefoot, reminding myself to appreciate the significance of each step along the shadowed path ahead and to cherish every grain of sand, every muddy patch, and every sacred stone.