By Ashley Lodato
Terri Price was picking up her granddaughter, Isolde, from ski team practice at Chickadee Trailhead last Tuesday. If you’ve been to Chickadee, you know that right at the warming hut there are several different trails that lead in and out of the trailhead, and one of them is a loop with a nice downhill, with part of the loop screened from view by a stand of pines.
When Terri arrived at Chickadee, the scene was a typical end-of-ski-practice one: some kids were skate-boarding along on one ski, other kids were playing ski tag, and a large group of younger kids was doing lap after lap on the loop with the hill — up one side of the loop, disappearing from view behind a row of trees for a moment, then reappearing on the downhill side of the loop. All the kids had on red jackets, black pants and white hats.
Terri gazed at the scene for quite a while, trying to identify Isolde from among about 60 identical-looking kids in the gathering dusk, and remarked, “It’s like being at baggage claim at the airport. You see all those suitcases circulating around and around on the carousel, and you know that one of them is yours, but you just can’t quite figure out which one since they all look alike.”
Terri eventually claimed her beloved baggage and went home.
I thought my run of shoe capers was over, but I was wrong. Apparently footwear stories play a large role in family lore. Phoebe Hershenow tells me of the time that her mother, who generally went barefoot, drove herself 60 miles to a doctor’s appointment with no shoes on. When she got to the distant hospital parking lot and realized that she couldn’t enter the building barefoot, she had no choice but to wear the only pair of shoes that happened to be in her car — a pair of size 14 boats belonging to her 6-foot, 3-inch grandson. I guess as a senior citizen your reputation is safer in clown shoes than shoeless.
Nick Hershenow had a pair of ragged old sneakers stolen from his front porch in Salt Lake City. He was surprised to see the shoes lying in the street several months later, blocks away in the downtown area. They were clearly his shoes, but someone had bothered to put in new laces.
You should have a ballot sitting on your counter by now; please vote yes on both school levy measures. These levies affect the generation of people who will be making policy decisions for the rest of us — and for the planet — in our old age. Let’s give them the benefit of a solid education.
