A Second Life for Joy’s Shoes

Joy’s $14 Amazon shoes are still in Oceanside, New York. But they’ve moved again.

Not far. According to the tracker, they’re now sitting in the parking lot of the building next door, which is owned by Renewable Recycling Inc. The company is primarily a registered mattress and textile recycling facility, but it has expanded its zero-waste programs to accept other things as well—including unmatched or unwanted shoes. And apparently those shoes can be recycled directly into high-performance construction insulation.

The street-level photo below was taken in June 2026 by Google Maps. I think you get the picture. Mattresses. Fabrics. Boxes of things. Piles of material waiting to be sorted, shredded, and turned into something else.

So after traveling from a loading dock in Miami to a semi heading north, stopping at truck stops in Florida and Pennsylvania, and eventually reaching Oceanside, I think I may finally know where Joy’s shoes are going.

And I’m a little sad about it.

I suppose I had been hoping someone would eventually pull them out of the enormous stream of Amazon returns, realize they were a perfectly good pair of shoes, and send them on to somebody who could use them. Instead, they may be destined for a shredder.

Still, it’s better than a landfill. If that’s where their journey ends, at least they’ll have a second life. Somewhere, someday, a tiny piece of Joy’s shoes may be keeping a building warm.

The irony is that I just bought Joy a $65 pair of Billy high tops. We love Billy shoes. They’re wonderfully designed and easy for her to get on and off. And I would hope that if I ever returned a nearly new pair—which I don’t plan to do—someone would retrieve them from the mountains of returns and resell them as gently used rather than grind them into insulation.

But after following one inexpensive pair of shoes for hundreds of miles, I’m beginning to understand just how strange the afterlife of a return can be.

Joy never really wore these shoes.

But apparently, they may still turn out to be useful.

A screenshot from Renewable Recycling Inc’s Instagram page.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

I work in the quiet room at the library most days. Some days I’m away from home for ten hours, and by the end of the day, I miss Joy and everyone else at home.

When I finally walk through the door, dinner is usually either still on the stove or already on the table. We eat, talk about the day, and then—often before I’ve had much time to settle in—I hear it.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

“Chips” does not simply mean chips. “Chips” means: Dad, get your shoes on. We are going to Dollar Tree.

This has become one of our evening routines. We go often enough that I suspect the Dollar Tree staff may call the police if we fail to show up by 9 p.m.

We hop on my three-wheel passenger trike. Joy puts on her pink helmet and buckles herself into the bench seat behind me. I flip on the headlight and tail lights. Dollar Tree is about a half mile away. We get there in about 5 minutes.

When we walk in, Joy gets the cart. I follow.

First stop: the chip aisle, naturally. Usually Pringles, despite the fact that we currently have at least six cans of Pringles in the pantry. Then health and beauty, where we may need Band-Aids whether anyone is injured or not. Then toys: Play-Doh, cheap dolls, assorted plastic objects that will be underfoot by tomorrow morning.

Then food: tuna packets, Red Vines, ketchup, off-brand drinks, and whatever else catches Joy’s eye.

Finally, we make our way through the household section for facial tissues, paper towels, disinfectant wipes, and other things that allow me to pretend this is actually a practical shopping trip.

One of my favorite things is simply watching Joy shop. She pushes the cart with purpose, perhaps a bit too fast for safety, examines the merchandise, makes decisions, and occasionally stops at one of those little price scanners to check what something costs.

The answer is usually $1.25. But Pringles are $2.50. She takes the whole process very seriously.

Which brings us to money.

I use a credit card for almost everything. I rarely carry cash, and Joy almost never sees me paying with actual bills.

But today Deb sold a few things on Facebook Marketplace, so for once we had a little stack of cash sitting on a side table in the living room.

Until Joy found it. She seemed to know instinctively that she had discovered something important.

Within moments, she was making it rain like she’d wandered into a strip club. Mom got some. Aunt Ashley got some. Fives and twenties were being handed out with remarkable generosity.

But of course Joy kept most of it. She stood there clutching a fistful of bills and waving them around like she had just won the lottery.

And I kept thinking: How does she even know what this is?

I’ve never really shown her money. She has play money for her ice cream stand, but it’s smaller, different colors, and looks nothing like actual U.S. currency.

Yet there she was, a seven-year-old, holding a wad of cash and looking exactly like someone who understood that life had suddenly taken a very favorable turn.

People sometimes joke that kids think money grows on trees.

Joy apparently has an even better system: Money simply appears on the living room table.

And when it does, you grab as much as you can, give a little to the people you love, and start planning your next trip to Dollar Tree.

Which, I assume, will be tomorrow.

“DAAAD! Chips!”

“Sit”

At 7 a.m., the duvet is thrown off my body. I open one eye to find the duvet. I reach down and pull it back up to my chin.

“Be a good girl, Joy,” I mumble to the toddler standing next to me.

Joy grabs the corner of the duvet and pulls it down to my knees.

“Okay, Joy,” I say. “I’m up.” I yawn. “Maybe once in a while you can pull the covers off Mommy.”

Joy takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen.

We agree to have Cheerios for breakfast, and chocolate milk to drink. And a bagel with lots of cream cheese and jelly. I make a cup of pour-over coffee.

Joy gives me a kiss that leaves a smear of cream cheese on my cheek.

“Sit,” she says. This is Joy’s latest word, and it’s perfect. I understand her completely.

“Sit?” I ask in feigned ignorance.

“Sit.”

So I sit next to her at the kitchen table. And she makes funny faces and hilarious hand gestures. I laugh.

Later, downstairs, Joy climbs on the stationary bike.

“Sit,” she says to me, pointing to the rowing machine.

So I sit on the rower and watch her try to reach the pedals on the bike. (Never gonna happen.) She gets off the bike and taps me on the shoulder as I work the rowing machine.

“Sit,” she says, pointing to the bike. Joy takes the rowing machine. I hop on the bike. Joy is very adept at the rowing machine.

Then she gets down on the carpet. She slaps the floor with the palm of her hand.

“Sit.”

I sit next to her and she immediately pushes me onto my back.

She leans over and gives me a kiss on the lips and then a peck on each eyelid.

Throughout the day, Joy will find a moment to take my hand, look up at me, and say, “Sit.”

To be honest, I do a lot of sitting already. My job is sitting at a laptop and moving words around.

But to Joy, sitting is daddy-daughter time. It has nothing to do with work.

To Joy, sit means “close the laptop and hold me on your lap instead.” Sit means “sit next to me, Daddy, and help me with blocks.” Sit means “spend time with me, watch me splash in the tub.” Sit means “see what I can do, Daddy.” Sit means “stay home a while longer.” Sit means “I love you.”

So, sit is my favorite word. For now.

Because, dear daughter, there are more words on the way, like dancing, skating, bowling, musicals, movies, swimming, picnics, and a hundred others.

Joy’s Art

Joy is now attending school—preschool. Four days a week at a wonderful Francis Howell program that meets children’s educational needs and is developmentally appropriate for all children, including Joy.

She comes home at noon and she just goes on and on about it. I’m not sure what she’s saying, but clearly she loves the three hours she spends doing things with her teachers and other kids her age.

Joy loves to draw. I took joy to Cracker Barrel the other day. After we got her finger unstuck from a hole in the table, Joy drew with crayons on the kids’ menu. She laughed when she finished her drawing. We then had pancakes and eggs and bacon. It was awesome. I assumed that all restaurants had gone downhill since the pandemic. I stand corrected.

But Joy really loves to draw on the walls of the new house. As you may know, we (mostly Peggy) painted about a month ago. The kitchen is now light yellow (Toasted Yellow). The living room is green (Greywood). Other rooms were painted in other earth tones, as well as white, cream, blue.

We have tried to keep pencils and pens out of Joy’s reach because she absolutely will fill up blank spaces with her art.

A few days ago, I walked in the living room and found Joy with a pencil. She was drawing on the living room wall. (I had done an editing test that day and left the pencil on the kitchen table.)

I said, “Oops. No, Joy! Let Daddy have the pencil.” She handed it to me. She smiled. Then she looked down like she was sorry or guilty of a crime.

I started walking around the house to see how much mural she had done.

“Let’s see,” I said to myself. “Every wall in the kitchen.” I continued walking. Every wall in the living room. The foyer. The walls in Joy’s bedroom. Every square inch of every wall in the master bedroom. The hallway. The bathroom. The staircase. I frowned.

I opened the box of magic erasers that I got on Amazon. It’s a 100 pack. I started erasing the hallway art.

I wasn’t mad. But I was a little sad. Because clearly Joy did this project alone. She worked on her masterpiece for at least an hour while everyone else was busy doing other things—running errands, talking on the phone, working, texting, heading to practice at the gym. I wished I had come home a bit earlier and could have stopped myself from taking her pencil and had kneeled down and watched her technique.

I think I want to get some large poster board. I want to tack it up all over the house. And I want to watch my baby make her art.