.:: The Dangling Shoes ::.
High above the rooftops in the neighborhood in which I live, hang hundreds of shoes on powerlines, from one post to the next. You can see them dangling by their laces sometimes in pairs or sometimes singularly, year in year out--season to season like now; scorched and worst for wear under the blazing eye of the New York summer sun.
If one observes closely, they are usually hung in lose proximity to each other, tons of them it seems like, in the sections in my neighborhood where children play basketball on the sidewalk by the corner bodegas, and where men gather outside all day long playing dominoes.
I've always wondered at this peculiar sight--it's as if exhibition of shoes have a statement to make. There are times when one or two find their way to the ground, as if having had enough of hanging around. Who hung them there? When? How? Why? are questions I always ask myself when on some days I bother to take more notice of them than on other days when I get on with life. Yet, the mystery of them until today at least, has always been a mystery etched in my mind.
Today I came upon an old man sitting on a wooden chair outside the corner bodega and I approached and asked him what the shoes meant by hanging there. He summoned someone from the store at which two men came out and to whom he posed the question in Spanish...soon the mystery of the dangling shoes was solved.
"We have put up many shoes" said one, "to honor the men, women and children who died in the streets. They are our friends and family" the other said as best he could in English. "I've seen my friend hit by a car, and a little girl fall out the window" he went on, "so we save their shoes and hang them late at night to remember them."
So if you my friend, who is reading this, ever happen to visit my neighborhood in West Manhattan in New York, and you come across shoes dangling from their laces high above the rooftops on powerlines and now on trees, and sometimes even a dead bird's freshly feathered body is wedged somewhere between remember, they are reminders of the dead and buried of the streets.
