New Trick for Old Dogs

My Facebook friends may recall that my one and only 2011 New Year’s Resolution was to learn new tricks so that I don’t become an old dog. The hard part was deciding what those new tricks might be. I considered learning to play the blues on the harmonica or blue grass on a five-string banjo. Both are still on my life list but I don’t see any hope for this year. I considered learning to tango but that requires my partner be involved and this was my resolution, not hers. Reading and writing poetry has become my main new trick. I would like to say that I came up with that by sagacity, but the truth is that it was serendipity. However, this short note is about another new trick which I freely admit was gotten to by having observant friends that like to point out my weaknesses.

I learned to tie my shoes fifty-five years ago in kindergarten. Jody McQuown taught me how to do this while we were supposed to be napping on our rugs. She taught me to make what I now know to be named the Two-Loop Shoelace Knot. This is quite different from  the Standard Shoelace Knot that everyone else in my family was tying. It seemed to me (as a five-year old) that making bunny ears and wrapping one around the other and then pushing one through the rabbit hole was a lot easier than what my parents and brother were trying to teach me. I still do.

I have often bragged that I tie a perfect bow for my shoes. When my wife and daughters needed a bow for a dress or their hair they would come to me to make one of these very symmetric bows. But what I didn’t realize, until a few weeks back, was that my “perfect bow” was not.

An emeritus math professor friend of mine was visiting and watching me tie my shoes. Engineers and mathematicians are really good at staring at other people’s feet. How do you tell if an engineer is an extrovert or an introvert? An extroverted engineer looks at your feet while he is talking to you, an introvert looks at his own. Anyway, my math professor friend watched me tie my traditional Two-Loop (Bunny-Ear) Shoelace Knot and then make it into a double knot. “I thought you were an Eagle Scout?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered with a little fear. Then, once I determined that he truly was watching the knot I tied, I said, “I know this is different but it produces a perfect knot.”

“No,” he said with a tone that I am sure he had developed from years of telling students that the way they just took the integral of the differential form was wrong. “You just tied a Granny Knot. No wonder you have to tie a double knot.”

Over the years I have taken to tying double knots in the bows so they don’t come undone. I first started doing this back when I ran with coworkers at lunchtime and they didn’t like stopping while I retied my shoes.

I was stunned. I looked at my shoes (more out of shame than checking what he had just said) and realized that he was right. Fifty-five years of training my hands to go right-over-left then right-over-left was wrong. I should have been going left-over-right then right-over-left, if I had ever thought about it. Tying your shoes is like riding a bicycle, if you think about what you are doing you will probably mess up. Now I would have to retrain my hands. I didn’t think it was possible. I immediately untied my shoes and retied them properly but with much difficulty. I was certain that I could not learn this new approach. I would never be able to tie my shoes in the dark again.

I am here to report that my old dogs now have new bows. Not only does a properly tied square-knot bow not need to be double knotted but old hands can be retaught. I still can’t figure out how I didn’t notice that I have been tying a Granny Knot for all of those years. I guess I am an extrovert.