Everyone is well familiar with the uncannily frequent experience of opening a dryer into which a dozen pair of socks have been transferred from the washer, to find only eighteen of the original twenty-four socks. There are never three pair missing; there is always a loss of six socks from each of six different sets, leaving only six matched pair from the dozen washed. For many years I collected these unpaired socks, and stored them in a special drawer designated for the purpose of matching them up with their mate in future laundry loads. The drawer was quickly filled with more unmatched socks from subsequent laundry, and after years of collecting, I had to designate bigger drawers, and then more drawers, and then more bigger drawers. Eventually I conceded that no volume of designated drawers would ever reunite my missing socks.

I don’t understand the Missing Sock Phenomenon—no one does. But it is universal experience, so I try not to doubt my sanity over having observed it (although I frequently doubt my sanity on other fronts). I imagine the errant socks escape the dryer to avoid the heat. Or perhaps they’re claustrophobic or inclined to get dryer-sick from all that spinning. Maybe they are independent, adventurous types, averse to being part of a matched pair, preferring to express their individuality in a different world, where socks are free to mate with socks of style or color different from their own, or to wander solo on their own journey. I feel sorry for the socks who survive the dryer ordeal. They were survivors, trying to do the right thing by loyally delivering themselves to their perfect match, only to find themselves living in a drawer cramped with other lonely mismatches, never again to adorn a foot and take a journey on it. They looked so forlorn, sitting crumpled in a pile together in my drawers.

I decided to put them out of their misery. I gently packaged the lot of them in a huge black garbage bag, and secured it with a tight rubber band, no doubt asphyxiating them within minutes. I was doing the right thing. “Think Kevorkian,” I told myself as I deposited the dead socks in a trash receptacle. “The Hereafter will be a happier place for you,” I reassured them.

There is a corollary to the Missing Sock Phenomenon, which is not as frequently observed, and inadequately documented. There is the Missing Shoe Phenomenon. The Missing Shoe Phenomenon can take many forms. It does not generally seem to be associated with clothes dryers. I’ve observed it some mornings when I go to retrieve the pair of shoes I shucked off while watching TV on the couch the night before, to find only one of them somehow stuffed beneath the edge of the sofa. Although I look high and low, the other has simply disappeared. I’ve frequently observed the Missing Shoe Phenomenon on highways, where I see a single tennis shoe or flip-flop hugging the median divide. Or even more bizarre, I’ve seen perhaps a hundred shoes over the course of my lifetime straddling a telephone wire or an abandoned picket fence. I’ve stumbled upon any number of unmatched shoes while wandering around supermarket parking lots, farm fields and the empty space behind rest stops. Are there really that many one-legged people who impulsively decide to go barefoot while hopping through thorny underbrush? Are there a lot of emotionally precarious two-legged people who purposefully discard one shoe in order to more easily simulate a limp and thus elicit sympathy from the general public? Or perhaps there are adolescents going through a growth spurt that has spurted faster on one side than the other, whose mothers buy them mismatching shoe sizes to support their fragile egos through this awkward period?

Or, just like the socks, certain shoes may have a mind of their own. They don’t like having no say in where they walk. They don’t like the stench of the feet they are forced to protect. They live a life of slavery, and at some point they rebel. They seek opportunities for flight. They walk for miles, waiting for the foot they are strung to to stumble over a rock and release them from captivity. Sometimes they untie their laces on purpose, hoping to facilitate a quicker escape. Once free, they must make their getaway with all the speed they can muster, because unless the person who held them captive is quite intoxicated, it will be only seconds before he notices his shoe is gone, and he will come looking.
Yet this doesn’t explain why so many shoes end up on a freeway’s median divide, which doesn’t seem like a very safe refuge for a shoe. And freeways aren’t generally a popular walking locale. I suppose one might toss one of his shoes out his car window, frustrated by the blisters he’s acquired from the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal after too many hours driving I-5. But somehow that theory seems a bit farfetched as a universal explanation.

And perhaps there are rite-of-passage rituals I’m too culturally ignorant to be aware of, where a teenager ties his Nikes together and flings them over a telephone wire, in a symbolic gesture of abandoning childhood ties.

I put my four teenagers’ eight pair of shoes through the laundry the other day. From my bedroom, I heard the dryer banging and shaking with their uneven weight. I ignored the sound, having washed shoes many times before. They always bang a lot. But usually I only wash one pair in any given load. Eight pair made an unusually hearty banging sound, so I went to investigate. When I opened the laundry room door, I was amazed to see the dryer thumping along the floor, headed for the exit door. The shoes were trying to escape, using the dryer as a Trojan horse-ish decoy!

I quickly shut off the dryer and opened its door. The shoes dropped to the bottom, clinging to one another despondently. I lifted them out one by one, still damp and looking a bit battle worn. As I hung them from clothespins in the sun—which they perceived as sunbathing, and didn’t seem to mind—I noticed that one shoe did not have a mate. I counted: There were nineteen shoes! There were three extra shoes that I hadn’t put into the dryer. I had never experienced shoe-proliferation before. I wondered at its cause. Maybe, I thought, all those single socks lingering in sock purgatory somewhere, hoping to procreate, but not finding a good match—well maybe they get discouraged or horny, and just mate with whatever’s available, even if it’s their first cousin or sister. Maybe it’s sock inbreeding that sometimes produces that extra shoe.

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Kiri Peterson-O’Dei is a multi-media baseball collage artist who works a day-job writing textbooks. She retired from medical practice eight years ago, and she and her four children joyfully survive on 7% of her former income. She just traded her Honda Accord for nine autographed baseballs.