It finally happened. For weeks now, I’ve been walking around wearing a white shoe on my left foot, and a black one on my right, except on a few days when I’ve had a black shoe on my right foot and a white one on my right, and nobody’s said anything.

Today, though, when it happened, I was wearing white on left, black on right, and I had just got scrambled eggs, a sandwich, and the local Tampere specialty mustamakkara, a blood sausage.

The gentleman in the next table coughed, and succeeded in getting my attention.

“Um, excuse me… um,” he said, and smiled.

His wife looked away, but turned back when I said, “Yes, sure.”

“Um … why are you wearing one black and one white shoe?” the man asked.

Like I said, I’ve been doing this for weeks now, proudly wearing my mixed pairs, hoping that somebody would ask me that, because I’ve thought that it’d be a great moment, that I’d feel a little special – and not in the air quotes kind of way like I’m sure many people who’ve seen me have described me – and maybe score some cheap points off a stranger.

Silly, yes.

But when the British gentleman finally asked me, I suddenly didn’t know what to say. I know I wanted to say “just because” but because I keep telling Son and Daughter that “’just because’ is not an answer”, I knew I had to come up with something better.

I’ve told Wife – jokingly – that I’m starting a trend. That in a couple of years all the cool people will be wearing mixed-pair shoes. And that when that happens, she’ll know who to thank for it. (See “Slow” for more about my trendsetting abilities).

(In fact, the night before, I had scored a small victory with her, when we saw a teenaged boy wearing one black and one red high-top sneaker at the amusement park.)

The British gentleman, in his sixties, was still smiling, and looking slightly embarrassed for asking such a silly question, but patiently waiting for an answer. I laughed, shrugged my shoulders and…

Just then his wife said, “It’s surely a fashion thing.”

“That’s right,” I said “I’m about to start a new trend, so when you start seeing people with shoes like this, you’ll know where you saw it first.”

Wife looked at me, knowingly. She knew that even though she once traveled to Nice, France, with one white and one purple shoe, she did it so by mistake, and you don’t start a trend just like that.

She knows that you have to keep at it, and she knows that this isn’t the first time I’m trying to get this shoe thing started. I spent the summer of 1999 in two pairs of shoes, wearing one yellow and one orange shoe at a time, alternating the pairings. I like to remember it was a huge hit, that people loved it, and if I’m not mistaken, they may have even carried me on their shoulders on the streets of Stockholm, for being so cool.

Twenty minutes after the British gentleman had asked me about my shoes, I met with a hockey writer colleague for a cup of coffee. When he saw me, he said, laughing: “Oh, I can tell that wearing different colored shoes is the new trend in Stockholm these days.”

Not yet. Not yet.