Shoes Looking for Good Home

What does this photo have to do with anything? Well not much, just a bunch of various colored and shaped shoes waiting for some kind soul to come along and put them on and walk off into the sunset.


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The sunset in this case would have been looking west over the Mediterranean Sea, as this market was on a street in Sidon, Lebanon, a ways south of Beirut, so if you walked into the sunset, you would very quickly be swimming. The Soap Museum in Sidon is worth the visit, as is the ocean front fortress, small but beautiful. Near Sidon is a large Palestinian refugee camp, like others in Lebanon, one of the saddest places in the world. I'm not a politician or a diplomat, but some things just seem so heartbreakingly wrong when you see them with your own eyes, that you know sooner or later they have to change. At least in the meanwhile there are brightly colored flip-flops to wear to the beach. The only problem is, most of the beaches in Lebanon were fouled by fuel oil that ran out of bombed storage tanks in the summer of 2006, at the same time most of the bridges around the country were bombed out, and some 400 apartment buildings in South Beirut leveled by high explosives falling from the sky. The things we do to each other. Driving down to Sidon we went past the Beirut Airport and the site where the US Marine Corps barracks was blown up way back in October 1983, sending 241 lacerated and crushed souls soaring up toward the heavens or plunging toward purgatory or some such, whatever, according to your beliefs. Go in peace... and in a pair of shoes from this photo... they are a bargain, dirt cheap.