The Shoes & The Firefly

As a science researcher throughout his career, Mark was a devoted and frequent attendee of professional meetings, and for decades went to the biannual Gordon Conferences in Vermont. He wanted me to go with him on every work trip, but I have a job that I’m required to go to on a pretty regular basis and for me these trips were often boring. Mark could easily be gone from the hotel for 8-10 hours a day, and it was rare that he would cut short even a single day for fear of missing some great speaker. Despite my apathetic attitude about going with him last summer, he insisted it would be wonderful and booked our flights.

For all its charm and rural beauty, Vermont didn’t offer a whole lot for me to do all day and it didn’t take long for my boredom to tip over to resentment. Mark’s intellectual tank was being filled and I was frequenting the same bookstore and coffee shop enough for the owners to greet me by name. After a few long days by myself, I had to remind him that the whole idea of this trip was for us to spend time together and that he should ditch at least one day of meetings.

He agreed and we decided to drive up to Maine for the day. It only took minutes for us to fall in love as I gasped, “It’s exactly like One Morning in Maine,” a book I used to read to the kids . We stopped in Yorktown and had fish and chips by the seaside, picked out our summer home in Kennebunkport, and walked the trails in the Rachel Carson State Park. We made a detour to a shopping center and would discover that this town was a stopping point for supplies for hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Mark got bored in the grocery store and was on the hunt for some coffee and would come back a few minutes later to tell me that hikers give themselves names on the trail.

How did he know this? He had just met Firefly.

This started a conversation between us about hiking the Appalachian Trail and how fun that would be. At least that’s what Mark thought. I couldn’t see me hauling a backpack around, sleeping in a tent, or showering once a week. I was certain, though, that it was something my brother-in-law would love and told Mark that I would gladly bow out so they could go together. Mark would disagree and say that it was something we should do together, for no other reason than to have trail names.

After we paid for our groceries, we went next door to a sporting goods store. We headed off in different directions and I ended up at the back of the store where I found a pair of Keen sandals that I thought Mark would like. He never bought himself much of anything but he loved those shoes as soon as he put them on and wore them out of the store. The rest of that summer and this one, those were his favorite shoes. Good for the garden, the creek bank, walking to the park with me or the hardware store for birdseed, a Saturday night movie, and wherever else his wandering feet would lead him. Despite the old adage that money can’t buy you happiness, it could buy a pair of shoes that made Mark pretty content with life.

In the Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes, “We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally, crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” 

Nothing I have read about grief has connected more with me than that. Obliterated? Yes. Most days I still feel like I’m a character in terribly sad movie and if somebody could just dump me back into my old life that would be so helpful for my state of mind. And that crazy, cool customer with her husband’s shoes? Every pair of Mark’s shoes are exactly where he left them. Two pair on the back porch, another flung off in his closet, and his favorite, the Keens he bought in Maine, still tucked under the buffet in the dining room. When I noticed them there the day after he died, I asked that nobody move them and now the Christmas tree is up and his summer sandals have remained in the same place since September.

We never did come up with any lasting agreement on what our trail names should be. He thought he’d go with Catfish which was what he was called in his college hockey playing days, and I couldn’t get past the cool, hip hiker with the flowing hair that went by the name of Firefly. Mark said that name was already taken and I had to pick something else but nothing rolled off the tongue quite like Firefly.

Maybe I didn’t give it much thought because I had no intention of hiking the Appalachian Trail, or maybe I had a feeling that I’d end up on a different trail one day. One that would require me to magically synchronize my blinking light with the stars in the winter sky, so that my husband would know that I kept his shoes where he left them in case he returns.