The Inconvenience of Red Shoe Laces

I am twenty-plus years into teaching and have ruined a few too many dress shirts and pants over the years to wear much of anything beyond moderately priced pants from The Gap, dry-fit polo shirts and quarter-zips, and a wide array of colored sneakers that typically match the polo shirts. I would guesstimate that 90% of the male teachers I know dress roughly the same.  

My school is doing an anti-bullying theme week at the moment. Monday was sports day. I wore an NC State shirt. The offensive line from the NC State football team stopped and read books and talked about college with my fifth graders.This morning, I woke up and put on a red polo shirt and a blue Cardinals hat to fit today's theme. To top off my outfit, I wore my red Nike Air Max sneakers.  

Unfortunately, as I was tying my shoe lace, one of them was broken. Really not that big of a deal, because I live two minutes from a Walgreens. So, at 6:30, I rolled into the store to find that they sold white and black shoelaces, but not red. 

Where else can you buy red shoelaces at 6:30 in the morning?  

Wally World?  

I went home, grabbed a pair of blue Adidas Superstars as a back-up plan and set off for Wally World. The Apex, North Carolina Wal-Mart has more than twenty cashier stations, but only four self-checkout stations were open this morning. I checked the shoe section and could not find red shoelaces. A token employee who appeared to be running the entire front-end of the store solo suggested I check the random junk they stock in each check-out aisle.  

No red shoelaces, but they did have one box of Allen & Ginter cards left next to their self-checkouts.  

I bought it, went out to my car, and put on my blue Adidas shoes.  

After getting my room set-up and attending a short meeting, I opened my packs of Allen & Ginter. It's been a minute since I pulled something good out of a pack of retail cards, but I think this qualifies as a quality find......

I ordered some new red shoelaces off of Amazon.