This reminds me of a great passage in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine; I remember reading it 50 years ago! It captured the feelings I had about getting a new pair

This reminds me of a great passage in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine; I remember reading it 50 years ago! It captured the feelings I had about getting a new pair of shoes, the main character is musing over how to explain to his dad why he needs new shoes: > Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer. > Douglas tried to get all this in words. > "Yes," said Father, "but what's wrong with last year's sneakers? Why can't you dig them out of the closet?" > Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but now in late June there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs. > "Don't you see?" said Douglas. "I just can't use last year's pair." > For last year's pair were dead inside. They had been fine when he started them out, last year. But by the end of summer, every year, you always found out, you always knew, you couldn't really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new year, and he felt that this time, with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all. So, yes, I want the new shoes.