You Are Nowhere Without a Sole

For the first part of the week, including Sunday, I dreamt about shoes.  Not in the Carrie Bradshaw sense of shoes, but like losing regular shoes. Like searching inside giant bags of shoes looking for a lost gold sandal.  Like the shoeshine service at the hotel in my dream turning violent. That kind of shoe thing.

I figured I must be concerned about my mobility and possibly that the visual manifestation (shoes) in my subconscious was inspired by my decision to take a teaching gig at the nearby (well, relatively nearby) Federal Penitentiary.

“Take off your shoes.”

“What’s that?”

“Your shoes have to go through the metal detector as well.”

It’s just like an airport, I thought. Except of course, nobody is going anywhere. I had been there waiting to go through my Federal Correctional Contractor orientation for two minutes and they already wanted to see my socks.

“Do you have an underwire bra on? It’s setting off the machine. It’s very sensitive.”

People told me that I would feel it, the kind of unease specific to being around a lock-up, as soon as I pulled into the parking lot and saw the menacing look of the expansive compound and the razor wire and observation towers (hello Foucalt) but that didn’t do it for me. My curiosity is stronger than my fear of authority, but my imagination is stronger than my curiosity so I eventually succeeded in freaking myself out. But it took the whole of all the parts of that morning; the urine analysis, the fingerprinting, the security procedure (including what to do in the event of fights, riots, tornados, and tobacco use) overview, and so on to make me feel it. And  feel it, for me, was the sensation that I was going to be held there indefinitely on some underwire bra technicality. I really didn’t know how much I was affected until I was snoozing over shoe dreams later that night.

“It’s ok if the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when the doors close behind you, it’s not really normal to be in this situation, inside these walls.”

The above statement was said to me by:

a) Carpenter who just installed a 12X17 foot walk-in closet for my shoes

b) Federal Correctional Facility Orientation Director

c) Father Paul at St. Agnes Church

So the next couple months will be dedicated to unnormal, as opposed to unusual, situations. How much of these unnormal things I will have clearance or clear conscious to write about I don’t know, but maybe I can establish my codeword -- my metaphor now: shoes. Run SK! Run!