Dude. Those are NOT my shoes.

In front of the old Mad Dog & Beans in Austin's West Campus, the power lines were once festooned with pairs of sneakers, dangling from their laces which had been tied together. This is back when I was a wide-eyed co-ed and used to be able to drink a shake at Mad Dog's without worrying about anything other than my eyes getting wider.

Mad Dog's has gone the way of Les Amis, Captain Quack's and my shake-drinking days. The shoes? Also gone. But today as I was returning home from driving someone somewhere (someone who can still drink a shake without remorse), I saw a pair of shoes on the side of the road. Right here in River City. They looked to be Hush Puppies, or something of that ilk.

It's strange to see litter of any sort on the road in The Woodlands. And a pair of shoes? Most peculiar. I know why the shoes were hanging on the power lines outside of Mad Dog's. I tried to come up with reasons for the Hush Puppies on Lake Woodlands Drive. Maybe a load of clothing for Goodwill, toted in the back of a pick-up truck; the truck swerved to avoid a possum and the load spilled. But that doesn't really make sense. Just the shoes? And both shoes, at that?

Not very likely. Besides, it was the wrong side of the street for a truck to be heading toward Goodwill.

I think I'll make up a reason and use it someday. That's how this works. I see something and it plants a little seed in my mind. Sometimes it takes a while for it to grow. Eventually, it turns into a hibiscus or a cucumber or something, and I plunk it down into a story. And I try to do it so convincingly that anyone reading the story would think that I was the one who left the shoes there. 

But I wasn't. I will tell you what brand they were; what size they were. How one was worn on the instep but the other wasn't. That the aglet was missing on the right-hand side of the left shoelace. And that the shoelaces were black, when they should have been brown.

All of that, and yet they are not my shoes.