and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

So I really really want to clear up this confusion of mine. You know, the urban legend that says a pair of shoes hanging from a telephone line means you can by some drugs in the area. Now, all my life, in almost every town I've been in, there has been a pair of shoes hanging from a line somewhere. Almost always shitty old running sneaks, worn out with most of the rubber gone at the toe and sometimes with the plastic emblem half ripped off, but always hanging at uneven lengths and always, always, hanging in the drizzle.

I don't know what it is about drugs or about running shoes but every time I see them hanging from the line it's fornlornly, in the wet mist of afterrain and always, always, sadly. Or maybe there is a correlation between sad rainy places and drug use. Maybe.

When I was a kid walking home from school every day I used to walk by two particularly ratty sneakers hanging on a line that crossed perpendicularly over the street. The line sat essentially in front of a house on one side - occupied at the time by the parents of Eric Weinrich (the NHL hockey player.. yes, we had some semi-famous people come out of gardiner, me) - and a house on the other - a nice big yellow victorian occupied by the local grade school's music teacher. Next door down the street lived my high school biology teacher and his grade school wife and further down a nice old couple in their 70's who always held a neighbourhood block party every year. Up the street lived the local Police chief. On the other side of the road was a mostly woods, with a small stream running down through a gulley and more woods and more as far as you could see.

Now, I'm not one to speculate.. but if I were.. who the hell was peddlin' the smack, hmmm? I can't even begin to guess. All I know is that eventually, the sneakers fell down. I guess they got tired of selling drugs. The laces hung around for awhile after that, all brown and grungy and finally they, too, fell off.

I guess they just don't sell any more drugs in my old stomping grounds. When I got outta 4th grade, I guess they just ran out of customers.