From the time I was very young, my mother let me choose my own clothes.  This resulted in some rather outlandish attire: cobalt blue pants splattered with daisies as big as my face, a hot pink, polka dot tent dress, white fish net stockings (which had to be painstakingly attached to one of the most irritating garments of all time, a garter belt), worn with a black and white op-art trench coat. I received some pointed looks from the mothers of my friends, but this bothered me not a jot. I thought I looked great, and no amount of icy staring would convince me otherwise.
But of all my glad rags, none stands out so much as a pair of sling backs purchased at Macy’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.  The year was 1967 and I was ten.  My feet had just achieved that most coveted of sizes—a woman’s five—and I was over the moon.  The shoes in question were a supple brown leather, with a two-inch heel.  Best of all, however, was the embellishment affixed to the toe: a series of circles decreasing in size, in brown and white patent leather, looking for all the world like a miniature target.   Bull’s eye!
I think I must have trembled as I tried them on. Looking in the store’s mirror, I was transfixed: my legs appeared longer, my body taller, my face more grown up. I have no recollection of what the salesman (they were all men in those years) thought of a child making such a purchase but nothing he said or did could have stopped me. The shoes were paid for and slipped into a shopping bag. I swear I could sense them glowing, with a spooky and possibly radioactive light, all the way home. The next day, their effect on the girls in my class was nothing less than galvanic.
“I can’t believe your mother let you buy those!” squealed a popular and disdainful girl whose opinion of me was clearly being revised in the instant.
“They are so groovy,” said a freckled redhead who was a staunch ally. 
“Can I try them on? Please?” begged another.  But I was afraid to let her, as if their magic might be diminished by sharing.
I wore those shoes morning, noon and night. I wore to them to school, with the hot pink dress and the trench coat. I wore them on weekends, with the daisy pants. I clomped around our apartment in them, wore them instead of slippers, of sneakers, and, on a couple of rainy days, instead of boots. Those shoes were both talisman and promise, a passport into a new country whose language and customs I was avid to learn.  I wore those shoes long after they stopped fitting, and my heel first poked, and then jutted, out the back. And when I could no longer wear them, I cherished them in their box, as if they were a fetish or a shrine. I only wish I had them still.