Shoelaces Ain't What They Used To Be

Shoelace……

The very word brings a tear of joy to your eye doesn’t it?  At least it ought to make you smile a little.  They ain't what they used to be.  If adversity builds character, shoelaces used to be character builders.

Back in the day (or as my kids say, “in the olden days when you were young,”), shoe laces were a source of daily aggravation.  Every pair of shoes I had sported at least one broken shoe lace or laces where the aglets were missing.   (I bet you never thought about the fact that those little plastic shoelace caps have a name)

Every time I tried to cinch my shoes on nice and tight, it seemed like I wound up with a 10” length of amputated shoelace in my hand.  They constantly broke.

Or, I’d put my shoes on to find that the (now much shorter shoelaces) had come out of the eyelets at the top of my shoe and I’d have to try and thread the needle with a hairy dog’s tail to lace them up.

Then there were several pairs of sneakers which I was constantly moving the laces up the shoe until eventually the lace was engaging only the top two eyelets in an attempt to hold the floppy sneaker on my foot.

Granted I came from a poor family so we didn’t have a drawer full of laces for replacements.  Maximizing the usage of a worn out lace was almost compulsory.  But even if we’d have had a quizillion extra pairs of laces in a drawer it wouldn’t have helped.  I would have had to carry around two extra pairs at all times just because of the MTBF (mean time between failure) of those crappy laces.   Shoelace technology sucked back then.

There were basically three choices (maybe four tops) and they were all cotton laces.  But you could get them in your choice of white, black or brown.  Brown was usually for Sunday School occasions when you had to wear the crappy dress shoes that otherwise would have been thrown away.

The fourth (potential) choice was leather laces which no self-respecting slum dweller would dream of putting in his “wish-they-were-actually-Chucks” shoes.

It was bad enough that my mom bought our shoes at the Pathmark (super market) out of the big dump bin at the end of the canned goods aisle.  Those kicks had genuine molded plastic soles (ice skates) on cheap canvas uppers and cost $1.89 a air.  That was humiliating enough but we would have been bully bait with leather laces that cost more than the shoe itself.

So we lived with white cotton laces until they were brown and beyond redemption (usually about two weeks) and finally needed to be replaced.  Then it was more cheap cotton laces from the supermarket again.

Back then, every lousy pair of shoes we owned probably needed a dozen pairs of replacement shoelaces before the shoe itself was shot.  Not anymore.

Fast-forward to modern times (nowadays as my kids say) and the current shoelace technology.

Besides having a quizillion different types of shoe laces in a bazillion different colors and stuff, shoelaces last forever now.  It’s like they’re made out of space alien material or something.  I end up throwing out a pair of shoes long before the laces even think of breaking.   In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a broken shoelace.

And those aglets that used to crack and fall off in one day??  Well now they display the shoe company’s logo on them and you couldn’t get them off the lace with a blow torch and pickax.

Shoelace technology is so great now that my kids may never experience the joy of a broken shoelace in their lives.

And that’s something to smile about I guess.