the devil that danced on the water

shoes tell a lot about someone's character, especially my character...here goes a wild tale.....i was walking down moi avenue today after a particularly nasty paper.....and suddenly my image flashed brightly and madly before me in one of those glass windows of a fancy, gisty shoe shop with a name that is difficult to remember...my eyes went all the way down to my sport shoes, they were torn around the edges as if a mouse nibbled them and the laces were too long that i could trip over them if i walked too fast....yet, when my sister gave them to me some time back they were so fresh and new and untortured, but after a time spent with dear old mr.writer they are telling a tale so different to the mind of the visualizer.....i felt this pang in my soul like i have been neglecting a part of my life, letting it waste away unnoticed....wish i knew which part that were.....for if anything else, crisp and new, is going the way of my shoe then boy do i need to see a psychiatrist...

speaking about shoes, my mum has this old time keepsake, brown sandals made out of a strange material ( it is hard to tell whether they were khaki or leather), she got them when she was about five years old and living in colonial kenya..... a state of emergency had been declared and no one was allowed to move about freely, but her elder sister, who worked in a pyrethrum board in eldoret, sneaked her out of the reserve one day on the back of a rattling truck that suffered from heavy bouts of whooping cough..... after many resuscitations along the way, the truck finally arrived in eldoret and my mother for the first time viewed this strange world of white people moving about with elegant hats and shoes, yes shoes, because my mother finally realized that what she was wearing could not be justifiably called shoes when placed next to what those white ladies were wearing.......

colonialism came and went, and those fine, dandy, high-nosed, aristocratic British ladies finally packed away from the sweet kenyan sunshine to wild destinations to the Isle of Mann or wherever colonialists go, but my mum still kept on to her old shoes, she never wore them again but time to time she glances at them, now especially that her sister died of ovarian cancer, perhaps she holds on to them because they remind her of dear sister's love.......

imelda marcos had 2000 pairs of shoes, 2000 pair....my foot, no wonder she looked so vain, i mean what do you need all those pairs for when you are only going to wear them once in 3 years....now this brings me to favourite topic-shoes.....no, don't get me wrong....am not a shoe freak and have little idea about the latest fashion in the same.....i only love shoes because they tell me something about the wearer......i assumed that the late queen mother was a strong determined spirit because she could wear high heels all the way upto her hundreds......i also wonder what kind of shoes Adolf Hitler wore when he committed suicide because that might save a lot of historians trouble when it comes to making up what was going up his mind...

i read an interesting article recently..... about a 3000-year old corpse that was found on the Alpine ridge between Austria and Italy and aptly named Otzi the Ice man.....i hear that his shoes were made with such remarkable industry that all this major shoe companies are trying to learn on his style.....there must be a long tale behind those shoes....were they made by his mother knowing that his son would be away for so long..or was his secret lover who fashioned it, a young lady's sweet present for the passion and intimacy they shared....who killed the bear from which those fine shoes were made....did they set out to hunt it or did it invade their village one moonlit night.....was otzi a scientist who wished to invent shoes that could keep the human feet free from frost-bite in the harsh Alpine coldness....may be one day someone will answer these questions for me, or may be they should not, for they may tamper with its magic, by explaining it away in dry, didacting tones....

anyway, the world's most expensive shoes, the cinderella slippers cost a whooping 2 million bucks and is made out of 565 platinum-set kwiat diamonds ( don't ask me what kwiat is), and were worn by an obscure star, Alicia Krauss to the oscar awards.....i hope that at the end of the day she still felt that her life was still a bazillion more diamonds as compared to that inanimate, soulless slipper, i hope she did not feel small, doing her best to protect that shiny, shodding material that she forgot to shine herself out to others, and make them not look down at the glitter of her feet but on the dazzle of her smile.....

but at the end of the day, shoes are there to stay, and they are much part and parcel of humanity, and if in doubt ask Otzi or the herdsmen of the dusty plains of 3000 BC mesopotamia who designed sandals.....and for a last opinion i believe that my mother's first shoes hold much more treasure than those cinderella slippers......