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Getting It Down
I can, and will, toot my horn now. After forty-four years of not getting it I did the other day finally come to an understanding about how to tie a shoe. It happened accidentally as my fingers made what my mind perceived as a mistake and then there it was--the tying of a shoe in such a way that I was in synch with contemporary American shoe tying. I do not want to underestimate the implication or value of this feat. To consider that I may have the potential to overcome past failures and, yes, even master simple tasks, makes me fairly dizzy. What I mean is, don't give up on me. I'm a comer, a late bloomer, a graying boomer, a man now cautiously synching up to the mainstream of aspiration. What? Oh, you liked me how I was? Well then, fuck it all.
I never got it when I was a youngster, the proper way to tie a shoe. I settled for all these years on a method that was a reasonable facsimile, and let me at least suggest, possibly superior way, of tying the lace up shoe or boot. But superior or not I felt the mark of outcast when tying in public. On those rare occasions when I found myself under close scrutiny I would obfuscate the shoe tying with my prematurely craggy hands. "Hey man, you have the hands of a ninety-year-old man and you are what, 25?" If at the time I was 27 I would say "27," happy not to be found out as someone who could not master what most every five-year-old has mastered. The vanity deficit of craggy hands I filed for later self-consciousness, behind, oh you know, all the usual pedestrian concerns of our time.
If this new method of shoe tying--which by the way I do not now employ as I have found it inferior as regards to my needs--is at least a sign of blossoming potential, then watch out world. I may someday soon return from my morning ablutions to find that, holy mother of Christ, the bed is made. The miracle of this will be in the succumbing to the mechanics of accidental behaviour.