ABSTRACT
I’m afraid to say they met an untimely end. It was a summer day in New York City. I was walking briskly from Penn Station to The Food Group’s offices on Thirty-Fourth Street. I was wildly self-conscious about these shoes, as I always felt my feet were much too big (they’re a size twelve). Honestly, the shoes felt like gunboats, like they were a block long. In spite of my feelings of self-consciousness, my ambition to be equipped with the right “captain of industry” clothing won out until I reached Second Avenue. On the corner was a fellow dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with a little table in front of him. He was selling socks, tube socks, to be precise, the long athletic ones with little red and blue stripes at the top. “Tube socks, get your tube socks here!” he exclaimed. “Two dollars apiece!” Just at that moment, he looked down at my enormous wing-tip shoes and said, “And you can get a pair for them big dogs, too!” The wing tips came off that evening and went in the closet.
