Perfect shoes

A number of years ago, at the invitation of the University of Catania in Sicily, I agreed to organize a week long course on computer graphics. I asked a number of my colleagues from various universities to teach on different subjects. College students, both male and female, signed up from all over Europe to attend. The course was held on the charming island of Lipari, one of a chain of eight islands off the northern coast of Sicily.

The town had been lovingly preserved for centuries, and was not much different than it had been eight hundred years before. Narrow cobblestone streets meandered around lovely little old buildings, and the entire village looked out upon the blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

We would spend days teaching courses, and then at night we would drink wine, tell stories, and students would play guitar and sing lovely folk songs, many of which were new to me. It was quite an idyllic week, and I suspect that just out of sight, a few of the students had paired together to personally advance the cause of international affairs.

I even got quite a bit of research done. For example, the first version of the iinteractive face that is on my web site was created that week.

Somewhere around the second day, feeling silly in my city shoes, I went to a local shop and bought a really comfortable pair of casual shoes, the kind the locals wore. The moment I put them on my feet I fell in love with them. I would wander around the cobblestone streets in perfect comfort, feeling as though I were walking on air. After a few days I started to wonder why they didn’t just make all shoes this comfortable.

When the day came to return home, I packed the shoes, eager to have them in my life back home. That first post-Lipari, morning, waking up back in my own bed in Manhattan, I put on my perfect shoes and ventured out into the streets.

And immediately discovered that I could not walk in them. Or rather, that it was impossible to walk in them fast enough not to constantly get jostled and bumped by all the busy New Yorkers around me. And I couldn’t really pick up the pace – if I tried to walk fast, the shoes would pretty much just slip off my feet. I suddenly realized that the entire time I had been in Lipari, I had been walking only about half as fast as I did when I was back in New York.

Sadly, I returned back to my apartment and, with a last wistful look, put the shoes away in my closet. They might be somewhere in that closet still. I lost track of them years ago.