White Tennis Shoes

I’ve always wondered about kids and white tennis shoes. That crisp, immaculate color radiating innocence, youth, a blank canvas of life ahead...for about four hours. By then, the canvas has been painted by the hands of childhood--the stain of park grass, a trip to the sandbox, the miscellaneous oily edibles that didn’t make it into the mouth. Why do we buy kids white tennis shoes in the first place? They’re speckled fate is sealed before the last stitch has been sewn.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Kids learn through experience, through doing, and some of that doing makes a mess. Some of that doing skins a knee. Some of that doing hurts some feelings. Through those doings, though, the blank canvas of childhood gets peppered with lessons on top of lessons like a mixed media installation at the SF MOMA (sometimes, I still don’t “get it” when it comes to abstract art, I hate to admit). The ever-winding experience of childhood, at least in part, is to learn by doing; the lessons we teach them through words can only go so far. Hearing that the asphalt is rough is much different than feeling the sting of a skinned knee.

That sense of experiential understanding is one of many threads that weaves its way through our entire lives. I’ve had my mom’s banana bread recipe for years. It took me many loaves to start to get it close to the way she does it, and even then, I’m looking to make my own impression on the taste. My first several pancakes will forever be the terrible cousins of the rest of them. I can read a recipe and follow culinary directions as well as anyone, but there’s some magic in the doing that somehow manifests in something that tastes better, even if I feel like I’m doing the exact same thing as the first time. In reality, the weight of experience of those first several are behind every move I make thereafter.

So it is with kids and white tennis shoes. They are meant to transform, to move innocence to experience (in the words of William Blake). If we aim to keep those shoes looking immaculate, we are doing the kids a disservice. Instead, we should be pointing out the various blank canvases that surround all of us, whether it be tennis shoes, a new recipe, or a different way of looking at abstract art.