But when my brother ties his shoes, he encircles the tip of his thumb at
the same time that he wraps around the first loop. This creates an
opening for the second loop to travel through, saving time and effort.
He claimed that everyone does it that way.
I tried it and it seemed to work, but was incredibly awkward to me.
It didn’t strike me as something that would be easy for a small
child to learn or that a person would stumble upon intuitively and
I still wasn’t convinced that it was the norm. I began to wonder
how I had learned my technique — I couldn’t remember who
it was who had actually taught me when I was a child, although it seemed
obvious that it wasn’t my older brother.
A few months later the family got together at Jeff’s house.
After dinner, I told them about Jeff and my shoe-tying debate. I took
off my shoe and demonstrated my technique and then Jeff’s.
“Show me how you tie your shoes,” I said, passing the
shoe on to my sister Janet.
Several people used a variation of Jeff’s thumb-wrapping method,
although my son Joe created two loops and tied them together and Jeff’s
son Lorenzo had a bizarre technique in which he did everything backwards,
resulting in his shoes coming untied almost immediately.
Finally, the shoe arrived in front of my dad.
Sometimes the most obvious of things somehow manage to escape your
consciousness.
My dad, you see, has only one thumb — the result of a childhood
accident.
