Requiem for a pair of shit-kickers:
Nike Air Max Deluxe Pure Platinum [Autumn 2018]
Product SKU: AV2589-100

Time for the Stars (first published in 1956), one of Robert A. Heinlein’s YA novels, features a slower-than-light interstellar exploration and colonization effort. Before launching any of their arks, the project’s backers scour the Earth for young twins and triplets who, through testing, are confirmed to possess an untapped ability to communicate telepathically with their sibling(s), instantaneously regardless of the physical real-world distance separating them. This ability, iirc (it’s been a dog’s age, or more, since I read the novel as a youngster), can be honed and strengthened through study and practice and all of the recruited twins and triplets undergo such training.

One twin of a given pair (or one triplet) joins the crew of a relativistic starship while the other remains on Earth and they function as something like a pair of walkie-talkies. If either twin dies or is incapacitated, that communications link is permanently severed, so each vessel has multiple psi-twins aboard for backup/redundancy purposes. Thanks to the effects of time dilation during the long periods of travel at near-c between star systems of interest, the crews (including the multiple shipboard twins per vessel) age much more slowly than people on Earth. You get the picture, right? A shipboard twin gets to go on adventures (and maybe get killed) among the stars while the Earthbound twin lives a safe, boring, comfortable life but ages and eventually dies.

The thumbnail at left shows the 1990 hardcover edition from Scribner’s, featuring dust jacket art by Ondre Pettingill that depicts the story’s two main characters: telepathic twins Tom and Pat Bartlett. One of them, the brother who remained on Terra, had passed away from old age before the other’s return.

Much like Time for the Stars‘s Pat Bartlett (the Bartlett who stayed on Earth), one of two identical pairs of Nike Air Max Deluxe Pure Platinums (product SKU: AV2589-100), purchased with some difficulty back in the Fall of 2018, recently arrived at the end of its useful lifetime and has exited our household. Moments after I snapped these photos, these shoes were in the trash, co-mingled with egg shells, bell pepper stems and seeds, styrofoam meat trays, and assorted other types of domestic refuse.

Both pairs were my normal, wear-around shoes for the year or so after I’d gotten them. Once both had begun to look a bit ratty, I’d bought new pairs of Air Maxes and set my 2018 NAMDPPs aside.

Time passed and a few years on I retrieved the more-bedraggled-looking pair from sneaker limbo, swapped out its laces for silicone-strip lace replacements (a few were still installed when I chucked this pair and are visible in some of the photos included here), and put them back into service as slip-ons for round-the-homestead tasks and runs to the nearby supermarket and convenience store. They became my expendable light-duty shit-kickers for short errands and dirty jobs.

The visible blueing where the pant legs of my jeans rubbed against the white fabric of the shoes’ tongues and collars and the bits of originally-clear-or-silvery-but-aged-yellow plastic in the same area are something that happened immediately after I’d begun wearing them. The other NAMDPPs have nearly identical stains and those marks have been impervious to casual efforts at cleaning. The yellowing isn’t nice, either, of course. The disintegration (evaporation?) of the shiny white coating on the midsole (the thing above the air bubble and beneath the upper) revealed the off-white material in the same way that abrasion of the thin enamel layer on a tooth will reveal the tooth’s dentine. The second pair (not shown in these pictures) has the same issue despite being in much better overall shape. I don’t know when it happened, but the shiny whiteness covering the midsole seems to have turned to imperceptibly tiny flecks of dust or sublimed into vapor at some point in the past and managed to do so completely unobserved.

Both pairs of NAMDPPs were a pain to wash. The round-the-house set fitted with silicone laces was worn a lot more, got much grimier, and was consequently washed more times. That washing may have accelerated the failure of whatever adhesive held the once-clear-or-silvery plastic toe cap (Nike calls it the tip in the Components of a Shoe diagram in a Buying Guide: What Are the Parts of a Shoe? article) to the white fabric of the upper. Grit, sawdust, and whatever else would collect there until I’d periodically turn the shoes, each in turn, upside-down and bang them against the inside of a garbage bin.

What ultimately did them in was a very small leak or puncture in the right-foot shoe’s air unit (i.e. the transparent walled bubble compartment above the sole of each shoe that runs from toe to heel). It hadn’t yet gotten large enough that the foot felt less cushioned while I was wearing them or that it made any noise when I walked around under normal conditions. Maybe it would have remained a tiny pinhole indefinitely. We will never know because, one pleasantly rainy day, that shoe began making a soft, but readily perceptible wheezy wet squishy-squeaky sound when I’d take a step and, first, the air being expelled due to the additional weight bearing down on that air unit passed through some water and then, an instant later when my weight shifted to the other foot, the air rushing into the unburdened air unit passed through water again.

The other pair of NAMDPPs, slightly spiffier-looking and until now held in ready reserve like one of the vessels in the USN‘s Mothball Fleet or an obsolete bomber from the USAF‘s Boneyard, has been returned to service, its laces removed and replaced with the same sort of silicone faux laces I’d used in its twin.