Keeping Secrets...and Flip Flops

I’ve been keeping a secret from Amy, my wife. 

It’s not a bad secret, or even a big secret.  In fact, it’s an idea really, brewing now in my mind for 6…7…maybe 8 years.  But it’s an idea that has forced me to hide some things from her.

As best as I recall and as much as I’ve been told, I lived my childhood in flip flops; spring, summer, and fall at least.  Cheap plastic drug store ones mostly.  I remember the early days of the season when the thong on each flip flop lit off flaming hot blisters between the toes.  But you toughen up after time; skin turns to scales, cuts turn to callouses, and careful turns to carefree.

You’ve probably noticed, there’s an ethos or attitude that accompanies flip flops.  It’s slow and easy.  Fewer worries, longer shorts, deeper breaths.  Bare-feet-puttering-along in green grass or on hot pavement is always only a slide step backwards away. 

I can’t tell you how much of that attitude I showed as a kiddo.  But I can tell you that character went with me into my emerging adult years.  Amy will tell you she loved that about me.  She’ll also tell you she misses that about me from time to time. 

I think I’ll resolve now to slip into flip flops more often this year especially considering The Shape of My Year…  Simple, Slow, Still.

When I became a Dad I learned the genius of flip flops.  No wrestling with shoe ties!  Just slip them on and run, untroubled, lighthearted, young and fun.  Off went the kids. 

Often enough, though, they’d come home weeping.  Tripping or dragging your feet on asphalt with flip flops on means peeled back skin, chipped toe nails, and blood.  Amy’s job was to hold the kid.  My job was to mend them up and send them off, still in flip flops. 

My mind is swimming with memories…

Racing around backyards.

Climbing around at parks. 

Flip flops piled up at the

door of Grandma’s house.

Walks together as a family,

not for exercise but for togetherness. 

And the beaches…so many beaches.

Flip flops were made for beaches. 

Rocks poking through the soft soles. 

Sand settling under heels and

between toes.  And now I’m lost…

Where was I going again?

Oh yes, the secret…or idea.

Idea’s come to me by the hundreds.  I have journals full of them.  Some are certainly better than others. 

I was on a walk one day on the beach between Semiahmoo and Birch Bay – the very same walk that earned me a bulky log, which I referenced in The Story of Two Stories – and I got an idea.  I was wandering along the shoreline noticing the steep rickety stairways ascending from the beach, up the craggy cliffs, to the homesteads perched high above.  Hanging along the lower railing of one particularly skeletal stairway were dozens of colorful buoys.  No apparent order to the array; perhaps simply the sequence with which they washed up. 

That’s cool… 

Hmmm. 

I wonder if…

Around our house, flip flops wear down like tires and when old, we toss them.  But every pair bears the scars of being well worn.  Every pair evinces so much character; the faded image that caught the kids’ attention, the bright colors, the memories…slow and easy as they were.

“What if I saved the kids’ flip flops for several years – each one a size larger as they grow – and then did something that sort of memorialized those youthful years and memories?  Stepping stones, a sculpture, hang them from a railing, something creative.”

So I did… collect them… for several years. 

Amy would throw a pair out and I’d secretly rescue one from the pair and stash it away for whenever and whatever.  More and more.  Until now, this year-long initiative of what I’m calling Losing Weight; this year-long initiative of sifting and searching through the corners of our life and getting rid of stuff that really we don’t need.

Well, recently I came to this basket of flip flops…

My heart throbbed, then sank.  I knew they had to go.  The pressure was on.  What shall I do with these plastic soles, with all their miles and memories; plastic souls really?  How shall I discard the rubber and yet preserve the remembrances?

Recently I read a book called, “Chasing Slow.”  It was a helpful read on several levels, but particularly she made me think about the importance of things.  Her suggestion was to simply memorialize things in pictures. 

Then it came to me.

The flip flops themselves?  Into the garbage…

But before that?  This…

I gathered up the whole lot of them, hiked on down to the beach in town, and line them out in the sandy.  It’s the best I could come up with. 

Then, I framed it up and wrapped it up as a years-in-the-making Mother’s Day gift.  And the coolest thing happened when she opened it. 

First, she loved it.  Her joy and gratitude were certain and obvious.

Second, with the kids hanging over her shoulder, all the miles, the memories, and the moments, came flooding back.  All the miles, the memories, and the moments now neatly and simply captured for years to come.