"If you want to impress a girl, compliment her on her shoes," my mother told me. Whenever she sees my shoes now, she tells me to get a new pair. The hypocrisy kills me.

I own only seven pairs of shoes, which includes one pair of basketball shoes, running shoes, dress shoes, sandals, and my furry black slippers. That leaves two pairs of kick-around shoes for everything else: the Mizunos shown here and an old pair of running shoes that have seen three paint parties.

I picked up the Mizunos two summers ago before departing for a week of exploring the streets of Italy. It was the first nice pair of running shoes I'd ever chosen to buy, probably because it was the first time I'd needed any. I called my dad to justify the price to him. Skeptical, he came to the store to see for himself before giving me the OK on buying them and then, of course, buying a pair for himself.

As I write this, my shoes flex while my feet are spastically bobbing in time with the music pumping through my headphones. I really like my shoes. They're extraordinarily comfortable and are connected to some very fond memories of mine. But people seem to find my shoes interesting because they think I should be wearing newer or nicer shoes, not because they are curious about what I've experienced in them.

If they asked, I'd tell them about the first scratch my shoes ever suffered. I was careening through the narrow streets of Florence on an old rented bicycle, wild Italian drivers accelerating provoked European cars just inches past my handlebars. I escaped to the inside of a roundabout, leaning hard into the turn, and the outside corner of my left foot grinded between the pedal and the coarse cement curb, sanding just a small spot off of the outer mesh skin of my new shoes.

These shoes have wandered through hiking trails and on mountain passes in Yellowstone National Park. They've gripped and released the court in Memorial Gym as I jumped to dunk. Another minute scrap of tread is torn off their rubber soles every day.

Even one of my roommates criticized my shoes. I gave him my reasons for wearing them: they're very comfortable, and I don't worry about messing them up, and they're made for my type of feet. I left out that they feel like a removable evolutionary advancement, and that I wear them because I want to, not because I need other people to compliment my shoes. He wasn't convinced, so I made him try them on. He said, "Damn...these are comfortable."

When I went to the store to get them, the lady at the counter asked me to jog down the aisle and back. I did, and she crouched down and watched my feet as I ran. She said I had high, stiff arches and brought out a few pairs to try. I tried the Mizuno Waveriders right away. They didn't feel like shoes; they felt like mystic socks. I jogged down the aisle and back, but I didn't want to stop. Jogging drew in air through the front and cooled my feet. It seemed better to keep moving and walking around, as though these shoes were a liaison between my feet and the earth, like the two had never really been acquainted before but now worked in unison.

For the first time in a long time, I took them off and just examined them last night. I found what I think is my favorite little scar - a half-inch groove in the arch on the bottom of the left shoe.

I was a camp counselor last summer and head of the ropes staff. I took down the last two high-ropes elements and clipped into the zip static belay. I hopped off the forty-four foot platform, swung my feet up and clamped them on the wire, then leaned back and relaxed for just a moment before I realized the steel cable would quickly score through the hard plastic sole of my shoes. I quickly released my feet, and zipped freely down.

So, yeah, I still wear these shoes around. Hopefully they'll be accomplices to some good experiences before too long. If I don't focus on the next thing people think I need to buy, but more so on the next thing I want to do, maybe my shoes will persevere. And if they can, maybe I can too.

This article appears in the latest issue of Versus magazine, on stands now.