Dangling Sneakers

How and why did a pair of sneakers get strung over a cable traversing an eight- lane highway? Eight minutes or so of pausing to see what's right in front of you.

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If you're here, it's to fill the time. Welcome. More and more life is filled with interludes, wedged between wall to wall scheduled blocks, commitments, productivity, progress, pay. The next few minutes commit you to nothing. I've reflected on a topical cultural theme, hopefully, but not asking you to do the same. It's just a pause in your day. In this day and age there is a simple explanation for how a pair of sneakers, laces tied together, were hung on a cable over the eight lane highway. I never noticed the lines across Interstate thirty five near the University Avenue exit until I saw the high top slung over one of them this morning. A drone placed them there. Pranksters with the cover of night maneuvering the drone in place. The more thrilling way the sneakers found their way up there is that a daredevil flung them twenty feet from a moving vehicle. I don't know if there's a time when there are no cars hurtling up I thirty five, a main north south artery in this metroplex of more than eight million. I haven't been on this stretch near downtown Fort Worth at three AM, but I've got to believe commercial traffic is never absent long enough for daredevils not to be concerned about getting sideswiped. No one hardly respects the 70 mile per hour in the city speed limit. Slow down more one hand holding something, anything on the back of a pickup truck's cab, the other hand practice swinging the sneakers in the dark, building the momentum to heave them at the right moment, building the courage to stand tall, hands free, held upright only by feet on the truck bed, to spring from a crouch to get to height, enough altitude to send the sneakers above the wire, one hundred percent reliant on the driver to keep their cool. Were they high? Did they even snag the sneakers on the first try? The sneakers are still hanging from the wire today. The shoes are a beaten white. They've shifted though, seems like the wind. Maybe the pranksters or another person inspired by the original act have meddled with them. The left shoe is lower than the right, but both sneakers appear lower to the ground. Still not reachable by, say, a tall man with long arms outstretched, standing on top of a semicab. But closer? Disturbing the way the sneakers penned on thin worn shoelaces. The why continues to elude me. The high flung sneakers are precarious. Even at sixty five miles per hour I think I see them swing ever so slightly. This is prairie toy. After all, the wind blows noticeably almost every day, unobstructed by any meaningful landmass from the Canadian colds or the warm Gulf of Mexico. Twisting. Tomorrow I'll see if I can glean another clue as to the what and why of these dangling sneakers. Stop and smell the roses. A dated advisory maybe. Do we even have access to roses the way we once did? The saying was probably inspired when we walked mostly, or rode horses. The turnpike was maybe then literally a toll road with pikes, a log shaven to a sharp point on both ends of the thoroughfare that was raised and lowered. You were more likely then than now to encounter roses in every garden along your walk, poking through fences in your neighborhood and along the way wherever your way took you. Maybe even wild roses growing along the edges of that ancient turnpike. Still, it's a valid exhortation alongside amber alerts and silver alerts and impending road hazards. There are roses out there if you look for them, objects of ephemeral but regenerating wonder. Velvety beauty for a day or days that then decays, disassembles, and dissolves beneath the surface. But it's not enough to observe the rose from a distance, to give it a nod and move on. The unique scent of any rose promises more. Don't go off and lose yourself in the thrusts and parries of the day. Don't just work through the to-do list from dawn to dusk and in bed without pausing. There is more satisfaction than what you glean from the act of putting a line through the task or deleting the letters from the screen one by one. The satisfaction doesn't really capture it all. It's about expansiveness of thought. Wonder, maybe, where there might not have been before. I checked on them on the way to work and on the way home, careful on the way back not to drive in the middle lane, right beneath the looming shoes. It's the way the shoes hang from the wire that makes me uneasy. A mass, tens, maybe a hundred times the weight of the laces tugging at the cable. Laces very taut. Never at rest. The breeze sometimes animates them. With each passing day the sneakers become more menacing. I imagine the feet, the legs, a torso that rose from the shoes that once and still could call the shoes their own. A high wire act, maintaining balance impossibly defying an agonizing death every two seconds. Performance art is a possibility, put there for the passers by to ponder the origin story of the sneakers. Is it some commentary on a humble artist or sweeping statement about the human condition in the twenty first century? Another day and another inspiration. That's it, the name of this high wire installation waiting for the other shoe to drop. Take it however you want to, whatever that means to you. Life has been played to this point. You have made your choices, a zigzag decision tree working in three dimensions. That's the question these dangling, twisting sneakers pose every day on the way south and on the way north. Whichever destination your payoff lies ahead of you. Be ready for it at your own peril. It's too soon for the elements to have eaten away at the shoelace fibers, but the sneakers appear to be creeping down even more. We've had a wet spring in early summer, but sunshine prevails where we are. The sneakers have yet to experience the dramatic temperature reverses we will get. Still, the laces should last well past the trials of a few icicle days this winter. Another day and I think it's not the work of a working artist, but that of a struggler, a straggler who stumbles into art. This is what he's saying. I know him. That is I see him or her every day. To the hundreds of you who pass me single file at the off-ramp traffic light, ignoring my sign asking for help. I don't need those sneakers. I'm lost. Traveling in circles, traveling on calluses on top of calluses. I'm not going anywhere that I can't go barefooted. Come as you are, leave as you are, leave as you came. I have nothing more to give to offer, I'm telling you. I'm in your face about it. Walk no more, nowhere to walk. Y'all are too rushed to walk. Sneakers are gone. Highway maintenance probably got around to removing the hazard, this distraction of mine.