This is my son Fallon’s shoe, a Skecher’s Hot Lights Chopper, U.S. size 12.  The toe, filled with LED lights, is glowing in the picture. It has been blinking at me from across the room all evening now. It reminds me of the heart of a shark I once saw beating on a dock in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, hours after it had been cut from the fish. Unlike that shark, Fallon’s shoe isn’t dead, but it is getting close, the flashes coming further and further apart.

Light-up shoes are a fact of life for American parents.  Fallon, who is four, is in the golden age of light-up shoes and he loves them.  But I gave little […]