One Word Will Make You Rethink How You Talk About Yourself
It works.
In the seventh grade, my brother made the basketball team. Not long after that, he came home and said, "I have to have a pair of Air Jordans.
There weren't many things on my brother's "have to have" list. So, we all sat up and took notice when he came home from school, insisting he had to have these shoes with a peculiar name that, at the time, no one had heard of.
What happened to Converse or Adidas? Air … what?
The Pilgrimage
We climbed into our station wagon with the wood on the sides and headed to the "local" mall, about 50 miles from our town.
There were ten shoe stores in the mall. I know this because we walked over every inch of those big, orange, leftover-from-the-70s tiles that paved the floor and went to all 10.
Apparently, every other seventh grader in the state also wanted Air Jordans, and no store had them in my brother's size. So we went to the next store, the next, and the next.
Such was the longing these new Air Jordan shoes inspired in the hearts of every seventh grade basketball player and, not long after, every one on the planet.
