The mystery of one shoe

William Least Heat-Moon decided to take a long road trip one day — across the United States on back roads in a van he called "Ghost Dancing."

His 1982 book about his epic journey is wonderful reading, especially in bed on a cold winter's night while you're quiet and warm and tucked in just so.

On his travels he found out much that was new and strange to him.

One thing that struck him and made him think was repeatedly seeing one shoe as he made his way across the country.

Where was the other shoe?

Why would someone throw one shoe out the car window?

What good was the other one, alone?

He finally concluded, without much conviction, that all those solitary shoes by the side of the road were the result of people dangling their feet out the window, with one shoe accidentally flying off and out onto the roadside.

In the "Talk of the Town" section of the January 19, 2004 New Yorker magazine appeared an interesting item about a psychologist in New York City whose specialty is finding solitary lost or abandoned gloves.

She classifies them as to type, size, and handedness, and then writes articles and papers about what it all means.

Her conclusion is that people lose one glove when they're multi-tasking and it slips away unnoticed.

This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that most of the gloves she finds are right-hand ones; this means, she says, that the mostly right-hand dominant glove losers took that one off to do whatever it is they needed more dexterity for.

Makes sense to me.