![]() They simply always wound up back in his duffel bag. He was neither proud of nor embarrassed by them. He did not believe it important that he maintain them properly so they’d never have to be replaced or duct-taped. Erik did not buy them to wear them forever. A pond that appears to have part of a toenail floating in it.įor a very long time, those now vintage Nike slides were not part of a long-term plan. Regardless, for an original investment of maybe $11, he had done his part to keep generations of men from countless fungal infections. Erik refused to wear them into the shower. He could point to the new shower shoes, to the picture, and say, “That’s me right there on my shoe,” which he did not do. Near the end of the 2018 season, when they rose up and played into Game 7 of the National League championship series, the Milwaukee Brewers gifted players and coaches- Erik included- with new shower shoes that had Vel-cro tabs and photographic images of the team celebrating a win. ![]() You can’t live other people’s lives for them. Some are known to wear those shower shoes over socks and in public. ![]() Other friends are currently clomping around in honest-to-goodness big-league shower shoes. Erik’s dad’s feet are close enough to 12, so he’s been through three or four pairs, some New Balance, some Adidas, whatever they were handing out, and if the shoes were somewhat oversized and clunky then he might consider that payback for the hockey- cup incident. Sympathetic clubbies shoved them into his hands like they were trying to dump evidence.Ī good friend of his wears size 12. He did not, however, always turn down the free shower shoes. They put a half inch, less by the end, between him and whatever was on that tile floor. And for so many years they’d remained his shower shoes because they were his shower shoes, and sandals turned shower shoes cost good money, even if the next pair might’ve been free. By the end, Erik clung to those shoes because they’d already made it that far together, and then it became a test to finish together what they’d started together. The sandals would become part shower shoes, part hazmat gear, and full-time travel companions through hundreds of minor-league towns and Japan and Canada and Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Mexico and a border town from where he could see Mexico. He’d watched with some curiosity as new teammates padded toward their showers in plastic-y team-issued sandals, wondered what that was about, and soon found himself in warm, ankle-deep water teeming with Band-Aid boats and Q-tip flotsam. So the slides began their journey across thousands of showers in hundreds of shower rooms, the dry and crisp flip-flop-flip on the way in, returning a soggy and flabby squish-squeak-squish. He was next informed that AL stood for “Alberta.” The one in Canada. After three days in Dunedin, FL, he was assigned to a minor-league team in Medicine Hat, AL, which was OK with Erik as he’d never been to Alabama. Erik was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the twenty- ninth round. The walking-around slides of college halls met the floors of professional baseball in the summer of 2002. Neither had he been in a lot of rooms- some tiled, some not, some lit, and some that definitely should not have been- of four walls, one drain, a dozen showerheads, and so much more that was not identifiable. You don’t have any forethought for the future.”Īt the time, he’d never heard of shower shoes. He also did not foresee the career, the one that tested the half-life of a hunk of rubber. When he picked out those particular sandals on that afternoon in North Wales, Erik did not foresee them as career-long allies. They didn’t get lost and they didn’t give out and they hardly took up any space at all. That in time they weren’t fresh from the box or perfect or, heavens, fancy, that they were faded and could only be appreciated by the man atop them, that every attendant in every clubhouse across nearly two decades tried helpfully to replace them, only made them more special. The shoes (which, for Erik, predate Sarah by a few months) grew older and a bit harder in places, softer in others. “They may be the least disgusting shoes of all time,” Erik tried while walking them straight to the garage.
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