Day 56j: Replacing one’s Tread; re-Singing one’s Song … (06/09/2019)
Afterwards, while hanging out in an outdoor café across the street from the church, my shoes presented their first real challenge of The Walk. As wonderful as they proved to be (with this one pair of Adidas indeed making it all the way to Chattanooga), the eyelets at the apex of their lacing did tend to tear* over time — forcing me to pause whenever they did so and use the extra-large safety pins I carried on my pack** to create new avenues through which their laces could run … 😉
“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. For even though they are born with a song of their own — an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Indeed, like all artists, they set out each day to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, and daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreating and re-beautifying the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance; a truly virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, and fell, therefore, into the realm of pure art.” ~ via Tom Robbins
*I ended up ripping through and then re-threading all four of my shoes’ top eyelets by the time I reached the coast of Spain, though no other shoe-accidents occurred thereafter, and I was able to hobble into Chattanooga wearing exactly the same pair of shoes in which I had set forth from Germany some 4000+ kilometers before … :O
**It was common for all pilgrims — those privileged as well as those penniless — to hand-wash their sweaty clothes each night, and then hang-dry the same from their backpacks (often using the aforementioned safety-pins) while walking the following day.
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