Short Shorts #7

When I was little my father and I went camping. He sat me down beside the slowly dying fire on a rather cool damp morning. With our butts firmly planted on makeshift chairs, and our feet resting on a log, he stopped to explain to me how to properly tie your shoe. Looping laces and talk of bunny holes. He deftly demonstrated the everyday task as I desperately tried to keep up. My small boyish eyes looking at his shoes then down at mine, my fingers in a tangle. He patiently repeated the lesson, and I grew more and more frustrated. Soon enough my mother called us for breakfast, and I hastily tied my shoes in an oddly created double knot. That make shift method of tying my laces would continue to grace the top of my shoes for not just my childhood, or even my adolescence. I never bothered to properly tie my shoes, even well after knowing how, until I started working in a shoe store in my mid-twenties. I was an adult, it was finally time to embrace the simplicities of living an adult life. But when I suddenly miss the uniqueness of youth, my shoes will be the first to relapse.