Adventures on the left and right banks of the Hudson

Sunday I braved the wilds of the big boxes to go to the big discount shoe retailer. Only Wednesday I had hoped to go to the small shoe discounter over by our office, in order to support it, but after lunch I discovered that my support through the years had been for naught: my little discounter was gone. So there I was, crawling amongst the boxes behind shiny SUVs, listening to the Pogues belt out a disarmingly earnest anthem about how generations of Irish immigrants "celebrate the land that made them refugees."

In the store there was a tall woman who surely harbored a deep-seeded desire to join Abba: round floppy leather cap (don't even know what to call it), corduroys made of vertical strips of many colors of fabric, with lace around the knee (nor do I know what to call them). Ridiculous sunglasses. Hmmmm... I thought, Russian. And, sure enough, her 6'5" broken-nosed boyfriend soon started speaking to her in a thuggish, mealy-mouthed Russian.

Back in the car, I listened to the Pogues song again, and my mind raced back to the mid-90s, at Columbia, when I was studying for my writtens one summer. OK, 1995. There was pick-up soccer on the field in front of Hamilton at dusk, and one night these Irish guys showed up. Fresh off the plane, they were in transit through a dorm at Columbia, destined for a kitchen somewhere on the Vineyard or some such for the summer. And they wanted to play soccer. And they did. And they were good. And I guess they were pissing me off by scoring goals or something. So this one guy and I are going for a loose ball and he slides and I'm trying to clear the ball, and I nail him in the Achilles tendon. He lies on the ground, writhing in pain, and I say something about we don't slide tackle when I knew that, though it wasn't intentional, I hadn't needed to strike the ball that hard, I was just basically pissed. And I could have injured the poor sap pretty bad, fresh off the plane.

That was the last time I hit anybody that hard. A final initiation into restraint.