lost and found

So I get a voicemail yesterday from a friend of mine who has just walked past an abandoned pair of gold shoes at an empty bus stop, for some reason was reminded of me and wanted to call and tell me about it. This makes me happy, that some people think of me when confronted with things like abandoned gold shoes and empty bus stops. Then I start to wonder, what did the shoes look like? Do I know these shoes? A long time ago I had a pair of gold lame platforms. Actually, I should say they were my mother’s and I inherited them for dress-up. These were magic shoes. These were the shoes I kicked off at age five to hop on my tricycle and tear down the driveway in an old green dress of my mother’s and one of her frosted wigs to try to run away from home. Oh yes, I was incognito and I was headed for big places, kids.

I’m pretty certain the shoes wound up going to Goodwill before I went off to college. So when I got the call, as unreasonable a thought as it was, I wondered if these were my shoes. Were they in Williamsburg or the Village? Did they know I was here? Were they looking for me? Did they wait long for the bus? Should I expect to find them waiting for me at my door when I get home just to be confronted with Why did you abandon us? We made you a tall golden disco goddess. And why did you abandon our sisters, the blue and green round toe glitter shoes with the clear Lucite heels? You abandoned us! But now, now we can be a family again! I decided these were probably not my shoes. They were most likely some grandma’s old worn out slippers that some trash diver found in a can out on Bedford Avenue. But for a moment I wondered at the fate of my shoes, the shoes that gave me confidence at five to think I could ride off into the Albuquerque sunset.

Early this morning I got a text message from another friend; all he said was that he wished he could swim like a dolphin. And I got to thinking about my friends, every last one of them, all of us headed for sunsets in our own ways, and it occurred to me that we are all dolphins. We have been dolphins all along. Some of us wear gold lame platforms, some of us ride tricycles, and some of us are horrible swimmers. Some of us even prefer the desert. But dolphins all, and that is how I found them.