Flip-Flop: A Father Ponders the Deeper Implications of Summer’s Favorite Accessory
(BLAST FROM THE PAST: From Seasons Magazines, Summer 2010 Issue) 
An Essay by Shawn Zimmerman
As the days get longer, the weather becomes warmer, and spring turns into summer, we are all united in remembering the poor conditions suffered by the Union Army’s Seventh Regiment Volunteers marching through the mud on Third Avenue in New York City during the Civil War. Their uniforms had arrived without buttons, their only muskets had been purchased by the officers themselves. “The men [are] very poorly dressed, in many cases with flip-flap shoes,” noted an 1861 letter to The New York Times. ”[They] have not yet been supplied with shoes, and still march flip-flop. Why? Whose business is all this, and why is it so carelessly attended to?”
While this is apparently the first time that the existence of flip-flops was chronicled in the Americas, it does seem unlikely that the author intended to state that a battalion of bearded Union Soldiers would be marching to war wearing bright orange and pink slabs of plastic held to their feet by glittery butterfly thongs. So, I don’t think it counts.
No, as far as I’m concerned, flip-flops didn’t exist until the summer of 1978, when I first became aware of them. I tried to like them. Heck, I wanted to love them—I swear! Seriously, I had the coolest Star Blazer flip-flops ever. They had the shape of the Yamato on the bottom, so when you walked around in the mud or snow, you left awesome spaceship-shaped imprints everywhere. But I just could not get past the fact that the only thing holding them to my foot was a cheap piece of slippery plastic with a razor-sharp seam cutting into the tender crevice between my two favorite toes.
Also, I still have a scar on my leg from when I tried to wear flip-flops and ride a bike at the same time and ended up riding the gravel slide to the bottom of the hill.
So, to summarize the discussion so far—flip-flops are ugly, flimsy, architecturally suspect, and they caused this wearer to trip and fall on his face right in front of Shelly, his third-grade crush. So, since I don’t like them, what can possibly account for their mysterious popularity?
Personally, I blame my daughter. The Girl is four years old and, if I may paraphrase Professor Severus Snape, she has embraced the subtle science and exacting art of the flip-flop.
Interesting piece of literary trivia that I just this moment made up: JK Rowling originally intended Snape to be an enthusiastic collector of flip-flops. According to my overactive imagination, that never made it into publication because her publishers were concerned about her enthusiastic overuse of the word “thong.”
But, back to my daughter’s Olympic ability to flip-flop. She is constantly changing her mind; she seems utterly unable to state what she wants on the first try. This is in complete contrast to my six-year-old son, who is incapable of changing his mind, even if his original intention is clearly and hilariously no longer what he actually wants. He is the exact opposite of a flip-flop—he is a Timberland workboot.
Upon asking the Boy what he wants to drink, he might respond “orange juice,” despite the fact that he actually hates the stuff. If I ask him “Do you mean apple juice?” he will somehow manage to become upset, even though that is, in fact, what he meant to say. He will drink the entire cup of the offending orange pulp, grimacing the entire time, just to prove that he wasn’t wrong.
The Girl, on the other hand, will flip-flop three times before she finishes the sentence: “I want . . . apple jui—no, water! I want strawberry milk!” By the time I get the strawberry milk to her, she will be convinced that she always wanted grape juice.
I have tried to work with her on this. I ask for confirmation three or four times before I get the beverage: “Are you sure that you want milk? Really? Milk? Are you absolutely sure that’s what you really want?” It’s all pointless effort on my part, of course. I would get better results if I just closed my eyes, opened the fridge, reached in, and gave her the first thing I grabbed. I would do that, too, except I know that it would result in a statement something like this: “No, daddy! Not the kosher dill pickle juice, the gherkin pickle juice!”
I suspect that something like this was responsible for the Seventh Regiment Volunteers trudging off to battle in flip-flops. I would not be surprised if every single one of them had a four-year-old daughter whose constant mood swings eventually made them throw on the first footwear they could find and volunteer for any job that would take them away for a few months.
So, why? Why does she so constantly flip-flop on everything? Why does she attend so carelessly to all this business? I’ve come up with three major hypotheses:
She doesn’t really care one way or the other,
She doesn’t know what she wants, or
She just likes to hear me grind my teeth.
None of these quite fits, though. She does care deeply—if she doesn’t get what she thinks she wants, she stomps off to her room, slams the door, throws herself face down on the bed, and will not acknowledge my presence for a length of time that is directly proportional to the seriousness of my offense. (Remember—she is four, not 14. I fully intend to grow a beard and join the Union Army once she actually hits puberty.)
The second one can’t be true either. The Girl has a strident opinion about everything, and she is constantly broadcasting those opinions, from the moment she wakes up until 15 minutes after she’s fallen asleep. “Daddy, you are a boy and I am a girl. Michael is my friend. Mommy has Girl Power. Look! There is my little ant friend. I like little baby ants but I hate big daddy ants. I like to squish them, but don’t hurt my little ant friend!”
The third option does seem the most likely, but my dentist gave me a special mouth guard for use when dealing with the Girl, so she no longer has to shout over the sound of cracking enamel.
My wife has pointed out a fourth possibility: the situation may have changed in ways too subtle for my masculine senses to perceive. For instance, yesterday, the Girl authorized the application of her light-up sneakers, but became distraught when I tried to put them on her: they were not the flip-flops she wanted. My wife pointed out that while I went to get the shoes, the Girl changed from pants and shirt into a dress, and that therefore the footwear change was “perfectly reasonable.” I do not consider this a credible theory. I think it’s more likely that they are ganging up on me.
That doesn’t leave much to work with, does it? But I will find out whose business this is, and why it is being so carelessly attended to. If I can crack the Girl Code, that will surely give me some insight into the Wife Cipher, and if I can solve that one, then the International Council of Guys will surely give me their greatest honor: Official Flip-flop Cobbler at their Annual Civil War Reenactment.
A software tester, professionally-trained chef Shawn Zimmerman has traveled extensively in Europe and India. He enjoys climbing, mountain biking and computer games.
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