Cork Mountain Incident

...And then I’m back from the Quinn Cummings Seemingly Endless Yet Oddly Fun for Her Book Blog Tour 2009.

During one of those weeks, because I’m all about adding a degree of difficulty just to see what fear tastes like, my family visited four cities in seven days. First we spent two and a half days in DC. Then we spent two nights near Bryn Mawr outside of Philadelphia. Then we spent a night in Philadelphia. Then we spent a night in Wilmington, Delaware. Three of these locations were lovely and interesting and historic; one lacked any qualities whatsoever. I’ll let you decide which was which.

Before we left, I was at Marina’s house, in the yard watching our children argue over whose turn it was to use the big water-gun when I suddenly spied something in the corner. Even in the shadows, my brain knew what those were. I was suddenly flooded with endorphins. I was barely able to gasp, “Are those…Kork-Ease?”

“Oh, you remember those?” Marina giggled.

Do I remember those? My entire sixth-grade was spent trying to convince my mother that high-heeled Kork-Ease wouldn’t make me look trashy. My mother counter-offered with the low-heeled Kork-Ease. I sneered. It was to be the high-heeled Kork-Ease my friends Shannon and Autumn wore or it was to be nothing at all.

It was to be nothing at all. Shannon and Autumn both ended up in rehab before their junior year of high-school which my mother has always mystically attributed to those shoes. In time, I grew old enough to wear heels whenever I felt so inclined but by then Kork-Ease had grown out of fashion. By then I had also learned that whatever femininity heels bring to the table is offset by the sensation of driving your toes through the working end of a fountain pen. I hadn’t thought of Kork-Ease in years but I was certainly thinking of them now. Marina let me try hers on. I sashayed around the house, my inner sixth-grader shrieking in delight. Marina crooned, “They’re on sale at Zappos. Free shipping, too.”

Free shipping? I can be 5’7” with free shipping? Done. They arrived two days later. I sashayed around my house and decided they went with everything. Daughter offered to help me break them in by clomping around the house but I vetoed that in my strong voice. Abuse my black satin dress shoes if you must, daughter of mine, because the odds of my going to a formal event are small; but the Kork-Ease are going to go with everything and also somehow reverse time and not make me a weird loser in high school.

When I packed a few days later for the Trip of Many Hotel Rooms the Kork-Ease were on the top of the suitcase pile. We had some evening plans, some dinner plans with friends and work-type things; also, I had to visit a few bookstores and meet store managers and smile at them. I figured it would be easier to smile if I was very tall. And it was, truly. The Kork-Ease did everything I had hoped for including giving me a girlish sway to my walk which comes from trying very hard not to fall down. Consort went with us as far as Philly then peeled off a day early for the "Paris of the Mid-Atlantic states" which is Wilmington, Delaware. The kid and I spent a day by ourselves in Philly, cramming in the few remaining Revolutionary nuggets we hadn’t gotten to the day before. On Thurdsay, we checked out of our hotel and, grabbing our luggage, headed to the subway which would take us to the train station which would get us to Wilmington.

Wouldn’t you think a concierge, if asked whether the subway was to the right or the left of a hotel entrance, would send you in the right direction? Wouldn’t you, in fact, assume that’s the very least you can expect of a concierge? Daughter and I walked quite a few blocks, our rolling luggage bouncing over the cobblestoned streets, before I started to realize that the fact that we were heading deeper into the industrial district probably meant we were heading the wrong way. So we headed back. But because we were in the old part of Philadelphia, before people had discovered straight lines, going back where we came from delivered us to another area entirely.

[Someone just wrote in asking, Quinn, how did you get lost on a neighborhood built on a grid? Take my word for it, if there's one single alley which doesn't align with the rest of the state, I will find it and I will take and I will get lost.]

I stared at my map and declared us hopelessly lost. I wasn’t too worried, though, because we weren’t expected anyplace for hours and we were in a big city, chock-full of cabs happy to correct our little misadventure with only the liberal application of money.

Well, they would have, if only the cabs hadn’t been on strike that day. Dozens of them drove past us with signs in their windows indicating their displeasure over something. As a rule I’m inclined to side with David over Goliath, but I really wished they had suffered in silence for one more afternoon. Having perused the map and accosted anyone who looked like a local, I knew we had to walk in that direction for as long as we could. At some point, we’d reach the train station, get to a main road and get on a bus to the subway. Or we’d die from the heat and the humidity at which point they’d put mob-caps on us and declare us Colonial death-reenactors. My daughter and I trudged onward, pulling our suitcases behind us until we finally got to Rittenhouse Square, a place notable because we could pick up the subway from there. Our adventure was nearly over and I could rest assured that my kid had seen and smelled more of Philadelphia than most of its police officers. She and I stood for a second in the center of the park, basking in the shade of the first trees we had seen in about two miles when someone tapped my shoulder.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the filthy homeless man said, “I think this is yours.”

He handed me a bright-pink sports bra. He pointed to my luggage, which had come unzipped, possibly from the clash of twentieth-century technology and eighteenth-century sidewalks. I gingerly took my bra, thanked him without actually looking at him and quickly dropped to my knees to examine the damage. My first concern was Consort’s GPS system, which he had been using in the rental car and had left with me to bring to Wilmington. It was small and it was expensive, just the sort of thing to go bouncing out but I quickly found it. My second fear was less financial and more bourgeois; had I functioned as some kind of Johnny Appleseed of underwear throughout the city? Johnny Lingerie? Well, I wasn’t going to pull everything out, but a rough headcount (as it were) led me to believe only the sports bra had made a break for it. I sighed in relief. I bought the kid a drink from a push-cart and we finally got on the subway and the train.

That night in Wilmington, I was telling Consort about my adventure, holding up the sports bra gingerly on the tip of my pinky when I noticed something in my luggage. I grabbed a Kork-Ease and then I flung everything else out of the luggage. There was no second Kork-Ease. Somewhere between Penn’s Landing and Rittenhouse Square, we had taken a casualty. A nearly unworn Kork-Ease shoe was now a citizen of the City of Brotherly Love.

We got back to Los Angeles and I started calling. The representative from Zappos, while sympathetic and frankly a little entertained, couldn’t sell me a single shoe. She suggested I try the Kork-Ease company. The representative from Kork-Ease, while sympathetic and frankly a little entertained, couldn’t sell me a single shoe. I have made my peace with the fact that if I’m to have a pair of Kork-Ease in my life, I’m going to have to buy another pair. I can’t say as I’m happy about it, but I’ll survive. But because I'm me, I can't throw away a perfectly good spinster sandal which committed no greater crime than not having made a break for it along with its partner.

Which is why there’s now a single sandal sitting, damning and mute, on the Bench of Random Objects, waiting for me to meet a single-legged woman who has the same unfinished business from her childhood.

Hey, I found fun things to do in Wilmington, Delaware. Anything can happen.