Unshod Quills

Rosemary Lombard on the theme of “Red Shoes.”

Red Shoes

Once I read—it must have been from a magazine in a waiting room—that the color red was the new neutral. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. Of all colors, red seems to carry the most symbolic and emotional baggage. What is the color of fire? of blood? of danger? of the heart and its Valentine? the color that makes the heart beat faster? If red is neutral, why is the coquette Musetta of La Bohème traditionally costumed in red or its close neighbor on the color wheel and the shy seamstress Mimi (the heroine, after all) given a muted color edging on drab? Why do the red shoes of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale represent the overblown vanity of a girl, taking on their own life and forcing her to dance until she begs for her feet—and the red shoes—to be amputated?
The eyes tend to track toward red shoes. Mine are nothing sexy: no towering heels or even open toes, just a pair of old granny boots and a pair of red and white flats; but almost every time I wear them, a pair of eyes drifts down to the shoes and I get comments. “I love your red shoes.” “Can I have the red shoes when you’re done with them?” I have never heard comments loving any of my true neutral collection, the black or brown or gray ones. I have, in fact, heard no comments at all.
In terrestrial turtles there are more color cones in the eye sensitive to red than those sensitive to other colors. The turtles in my behavioral lab seem to favor red objects, a characteristic most likely adaptive: They notice a strawberry, a hibiscus flower, the red eye of a male box turtle, my red shoes.

Neutral

Eyes drift down
and focus on my feet.
Where did I read . . .
Who was it said
that red
was the new
neutral?

Some waiting-room rag
for women (or sheep)
exploiting, perchance
inventing a trend.
What bull!

If red is so neutral,
why then do they costume
Musetta in red, Musetta the shameless coquette,
while shy seamstress Mimi
(the heroine, you know)
wears colors so drab and so muted?
And why do I
love all my red shoes?

Now I don’t dress at the height—
or the foot height—of fashion.
Foot fetish? Not that.

Perhaps it is vanity?
like the girl whose red shoes,
fast to her feet, made her dance—
and danced her off to desperation?
No, but it might be a little of that.

Why, I don’t buy things new,
and who has ever said
to me effusive ohs,
I do so love your jet black shoes . . .
your mud-tinted shoes . . .
your sweet dirty gray shoes!

But red? That’s another story.

Take my old flat granny boots
all laced up in their fire-truck red:
“Oh, I love . . . ” or “May I have
those shoes—so red!— when you are through?”
(Not when life is through with me,
but when I am through with them—the boots,
if that’s what she meant by the rave—
and that not long before the day
when my stockings stick through the soles
and pad over the pavement’s rough rocks.)

What is it, then, about color?
its emotional symbols, its signs?
For red, the color of fire, of danger, of blood,
of the heart and of its Valentine,
our senses and neurons
construct the connections.
How the links make the blood run the river!

Perhaps we mimic a bale of box turtles,
given extra color cones for sensing red,
whose choices—neither pale nor neutral,
but to turtles presumably useful—
elect the reddest, ripest berry,
the brightest bloom of Hibiscus sinensis,
the red-pepper eyes of a box turtle male, and
my
red
shoes.

Author Biography

Animal behaviorist and turtle cognition specialist Rosemary Lombard has one foot in the arts and humanities, the other in science. Her nonfiction story “Diode,” adapted from her WIP, Diode’s Experiment: A Box Turtle Investigates the Human World, just won the first place Kay Snow Award in the nonfiction division. Reading: Blackbird Wine Shop, Feb. 1.

Tagged fiction, Oregon, photography, Poetry, Rosemary Lombard, turtles