Red Shoes

There are a number of things I don’t understand.

This has become a longer list as I’ve gotten older, which is not how I expected aging to work.

When I was twenty, I assumed that by sixty I would understand taxes, electricity, women, and why a washing machine occasionally decides it has had enough and begins walking across the laundry room.

I understand none of these things.

My wife says this is because I confuse getting older with becoming qualified.

“Now, Marcel…”

That was all she said.

She was making coffee at the time, so I decided not to challenge the woman in charge of the coffee.

Anyway.

I was sitting on my beer crate the other afternoon, doing absolutely nothing, when someone walked past the house.

I have seen this person before.

Not often.

Young. Maybe twenty-five. Maybe thirty. I have reached the age where everybody between nineteen and thirty-seven appears to be approximately twenty-six.

I call them The Red Shoes.

For the obvious reason.

They have very red shoes.

The sort of red that suggests the shoes were not purchased after a lengthy discussion with anybody else.

I have seen The Red Shoes change over the years. Clothes. Hair. The way they carry themselves. Somewhere along the way I realized that the person I had once assumed was a young man was telling the world something different.

I don’t know the story.

And because I was raised in an era when you did not ask strangers personal questions unless they were bleeding on your driveway, I have never asked.

We nod.

That’s it.

The Red Shoes nods at me.

I nod at The Red Shoes.

There is a surprising amount of civilization contained in a decent nod.

But it got me thinking.

I don’t really understand what it must feel like to be born in a body that doesn’t match who you know yourself to be.

I have tried.

I have sat there with my coffee and tried to imagine it.

But I can’t.

I have always been a man.

Not particularly good at it, perhaps.

I own three screwdrivers that are all the wrong screwdriver when I need one. I once spent an entire Saturday assembling a cabinet backward. I have no interest in discussing the horsepower of anything.

But I have never looked at myself and felt that the word man belonged to somebody else.

It fits without me thinking about it.

Maybe that is precisely why it is difficult for me to understand someone for whom it doesn’t.

You can explain cold weather to a man who has never been cold.

You can tell him about ice and numb fingers and the little cloud your breath makes in front of your face.

He may understand every word.

But he still hasn’t been cold.

There are things another human being can explain perfectly and you still cannot feel them from the inside.

I think we sometimes mistake that for disbelief.

We say, “I don’t understand.”

And somewhere along the way those four words became dangerously close to, “Therefore you must be wrong.”

I’m not sure when we agreed to that.

I don’t understand opera either.

Opera continues without my permission.

The Red Shoes passed again a few days later while I was sweeping leaves away from the front of the house.

I wasn’t really sweeping them away.

I was moving them to a place where the wind could make the next decision.

They stopped.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon.”

Then they pointed at my broom.

“You know they’re coming back, right?”

I looked at the leaves.

“I believe in giving them a choice.”

The Red Shoes smiled.

Then they continued down the street.

That was the whole conversation.

And somehow it seemed enough.

Later I mentioned it to my wife.

I told her I still couldn’t quite get my head around what it must be like when the body you were born with and the person you know yourself to be don’t seem to tell the same story.

She listened.

My wife is very good at listening when I am working my way toward a point she arrived at ten minutes earlier.

I said I didn’t want my inability to understand it to sound like I didn’t respect it.

She put down her cup.

“Now, Marcel, you don’t have to understand how somebody feels to believe them when they tell you.”

And there it was.

Forty years of marriage has taught me that my wife can end a twenty-minute internal debate using seventeen words and a coffee cup.

I thought about The Red Shoes after that.

About all the things people carry around that I will never completely understand.

Grief that isn’t mine.

Fear I’ve never had.

Love I haven’t felt.

A childhood I didn’t live.

A body I don’t wake up in.

We spend an awful lot of time asking other people to make their lives understandable to us.

Maybe that’s an unreasonable amount of paperwork.

Perhaps sometimes a person can simply tell you who they are.

And you can say okay.

Not because you suddenly understand everything.

Not because every question in your head has disappeared.

But because there is another person standing in front of you, and that ought to count for something.

Yesterday The Red Shoes came by again.

Red shoes. Grocery bag. Phone in one hand.

They nodded.

I nodded.

Nothing had changed, really.

I still didn’t know their story.

I still couldn’t imagine what it feels like to live it.

The afternoon was warm. Somewhere down the street Captain Leafblower had declared war on nature again, and a delivery van was blocking half the road.

The Red Shoes kept walking.

I went back to my coffee.

And it occurred to me that perhaps understanding is not always the door we have to walk through first.

Sometimes respect will get us there just fine.