Not your grandma's ruby slippers

A number of years ago I drove the turnpikes across Indiana and more than half of Ohio to my niece’s wedding. A few miles before South Bend I stopped for gas and I noticed the right rear tire was low. I had a spare but didn’t trust it, and I didn’t want to change the tire in my suit if at all possible. I filled the tire, but at the next service plaza I stopped again to check it. Sure enough it was low again. I filled it and went on, stopping at every service station for fresh air.

I checked into the hotel, arriving just in time for the ceremony. Both wedding a reception were held in the hotel. At the reception I met an attractive woman about my age, and we flirted a little, but we agreed we shouldn’t take it any further because now we were family of a sort. (As it turned out, my niece’s marriage lasted less than a year.) At dawn the next morning I went down to the parking lot to check the tire. It was low, but the car looked to be drivable. Across the street was a shopping mall with a Sears. I’d ascertained the previous evening that the Auto Shop would be open today, Sunday, at ten o’clock. I planned to buy a set of new, badly needed tires.

Beneath a light pole in the parking lot a space or two from my car was a ruby slipper. Just one. Of course I wondered how it came to be there and what happened to the other one and what was the story of whoever had been wearing these slippers. I should have taken the slipper or at least taken a photograph of it, but I didn’t think of it, and even if I had thought of it, this was a time before cell phone cameras and my regular camera was up in my room, and I probably wouldn’t have thought it quite proper to take the slipper, even if it was abandoned. I went back to the room. The woman from the wedding was still asleep. I crawled carefully back into bed pretending I was trying not to wake her. I didn’t succeed or I did succeed, and when she heard about the slipper she wanted to see for herself, so we snuck down to the parking lot like guilty teenagers.

Later that morning, closer to noon than ten, I did buy four new tires, and we made the trip home without incident, though we did stop several times for various reasons.