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| New Orleans' famous Mid-City Baby Shoe documented in the wild. |
The Mid-City Baby Shoe appears and disappears randomly and without fanfare. Most people see it on the street but that is only because most people are on the street. More people walk past my house every day than see what's inside it. The Baby Shoe has appeared in my house, but only my wife and I saw it. By the time our friends came over to witness it, the white baby shoe was gone. There was a white feather in its place.
Lola sneezed and the feather drifted down the stairwell and out the window, never to be seen again. Thanks, Lola. I know you couldn't help it. You wouldn't have sneezed if it was a baby shoe.
Here's what it looked like when I saw it: It was a white leather shoe with orthopedic soles made for a baby. It was tied. It was scuffed all about the toe and on both sides and on its heel.
It's hard to tell if a baby shoe is a right shoe or a left shoe. It's not like they walk around in them and it's not like they'll complain if they have their shoes on the wrong feet. One plain white baby shoe is pretty much like any other, especially when they are bronzed, which the Mid-City Baby Shoe is not. The Mid-City Baby Shoe shows definite signs of wear and tear. Some baby has worn this shoe and put it through its paces.
The Mid-City Baby Shoe is scruffy.
The Mid-City Baby Shoe appears only for a short while. Then, it disappears to reappear somewhere else. It's not an omen. It doesn't foretell doom or anything like that. It's just a randomly appearing and disappearing baby shoe. It is no more unusual than any other New Orleans mystery.
People study New Orleans all the time. For a small city it gets more than its share of attention from scholars and cryptozoologists, paranormal investigators, ghost hunters, fringe scientists, voodoo practitioners, exorcists, New Age kooks, and quantum physicists. It's the physicists that particularly study the Mid-City Baby Shoe most seriously. Something about the space-time continuum and particle wave theory. I don't know. It's all mumbo-jumbo to me.
All I know is what I see. I've seen the Mid-City Baby Shoe in my underwear drawer. Neither I nor my wife knows how it got there. We had never seen it before then. It didn't scare us. Who gets scared by a white baby shoe? We already knew its backstory so we knew there was no cause for alarm. It's appearance was neither a blessing nor a curse. The shoe was gone within half an hour, before Lola could get there.
I saw the Mid-City Baby Shoe the other day on the street:
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| Mid-City Baby Shoe on North Rocheblave Street. |
Some kids were poking it with a stick. I shooed them away. The shoe wasn't hurting anyone. Why torment it?
In a city like New Orleans, and there are very few cities on God's green earth that are like New Orleans, you never know what you'll find when you turn a corner or you open your underwear drawer. Sometimes, it's a treat. Sometimes, it's a scare. Sometimes, it's just plain odd. Sometimes, you'll care, and, sometimes, you won't.
Go with the flow. That's the New Orleans State of Mind.
A word from our sponsor: If you want to go with the flow in a New Orleans state of mind, there is really only one place to stay when you visit this wonderful city we call home. La Belle Esplanade is a small, artisanal hotel on a beautiful and historic street that runs through the neighborhoods where these stories are set. The fact that we live on Esplanade Avenue is how I collected this lore in order to share it with the wider internet.
Maybe you think the stories I've been posting here the past few weeks are all made up. Nope. They're not.
We live in a magical part of New Orleans. You really don't know what pleasant surprise awaits you when you turn a corner here. Visit New Orleans like you belong here and stay at the small New Orleans hotel that respects you intelligence. You have two New Orleans goodwill ambassadors standing by to assist. We only have five suites so we tend to fill up early. Plan ahead!
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