People are talking a lot these days about amino acids, but no one is saying anything about my new shoes. Too bad. They're great shoes. You would actually think they're boots, but no, they're shoes. It's as though someone took boots, understood what's beautiful about them - the heft, the toughness - kept that and stripped off all the rest.

That's for starters. When you get close to them and notice the details, you become even more appreciative. They are new shoes, but their leather looks grainy, cracked, ancient. First brilliant stroke. Cutting down the length of the shoe, in the middle, there is a pronounced seam stitched in white thread, whose unfinished look emphasizes even more - against the black, cracked backdrop - the aura of oldness. Second brilliant stroke.

On the back of the shoe is a small cut that creates a triangle-shaped opening, and this is the most brilliant stroke of all. Until now I had seen this kind of opening in slacks, but never in shoes; if I am not mistaken, it generates amazement. Turn the shoe over and you see that not only is the sole made of leather, but it is also connected to the shoe with small nails, thus further heightening the feeling that the shoes catapulted into the 21st century from some primeval past and were made by dwarfs who secretly assist shoemakers.

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These are not ordinary shoes. They are amenable to being looked at for quite some time. Gazing at them seems to produce a state of delving deeper than the world's existence, provoking in the mind not only an image, but a memory, too.

They are not in the least retro, these shoes. They do not recall something that once was. If anything, they recall something that never was. Something that could have been, but in the end remained unrealized. If you look at them like you are going back in time, you do so not because they look like a new-old idea, but because they look like an old-new idea. An idea which could have been put forward in the past, but which only now has assumed a concrete form. A memory that was waiting to happen. It's not with nostalgia that you observe these shoes, but with reverse nostalgia: In their case, the past is nostalgic for the present. Come what may, I want to be buried in them.

Like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever," when I walk down the street I search out a shoe store so that I can lift my foot up and compare what I am wearing to the pair in the window - an ego-moment for the urban male - but somehow it doesn't look like that will happen. Somehow it seems like the Bee Gees song that's playing in the background is not "Staying Alive," but "Tragedy." Who am I trying to kid? This ain't New York, it's Hod Hasharon. These two, New York and Hod Hasharon, are simply not alike. From whatever angle you care to look at it. There's not so much as a hint of resemblance.

No chic, just Jeeps

Life in the suburbs. Exile on Main Street. People talk about this a lot - about life outside the city, where they take pride in education and in collecting pruned branches, in the tranquillity and in the matching street bricks - but no one opens his mouth to rail against the department of attire and footwear, against the dreariness that emanates from the residents. I check it out repeatedly, on the men in the cafes, the women on line at the bank, every day anew; the parents who pick up their kids from the kindergarten, the families wandering around in the mall. I have no idea who they are, I know nothing about their inner world, but I can say with certainty, with uncorrectable certainty, that they dress terribly. No connection to chic, no small private melody of elegance, not even one real pair of jeans. It's not even depressing, only vacuous. Pale and formless, lifeless.

It's not that everyone in the metropolis looks like they stepped out of a fashion magazine, or that there are no people of taste in the satellite towns. The problem with the suburbanites is that they snap to life only when they close the door behind them. Or, of course, when they go to Tel Aviv. In their daily suburban-ness they see no need to contribute style to the public arena - not because they have no style, but because they have no public arena. But they do have parking.

The whole suburban flow is from the outside in, from the street to the house. When life finally does leave the house, it's so functional and limited that it is completely lacking in tension and interest. No sting, only public squares. Of all the innate advantages the big city has when it comes to the style front, this is perhaps the most decisive: the fact that a big city exists outside the home no less than it does inside it, and that its outside existence is far more stimulating than the outside existence in the suburbs.

It's a question of energy and sophistication. In the suburbs there is no interest in leaving the house, not to mention in doing so well-dressed. Whereas a big city is full of population groups for whom the street is part of their inner being, their chief delight, the dominant human unit in the suburbs - the family - views the street as a mere necessity. Whereas in the city life in the street is fraught with opportunities and nuances, the streets in the suburbs are a yawning opening for what is ordinary. That's immediately obvious in the architecture there.

It's also a question of competition: If only the people in the suburbs had cause to compete with one another over their clothes closets like they compete over their gardens! But why should they? Their "hosting self" is more sensual than their "dressing self." Their real estate and vehicular status is more important for "the pose" than their wardrobe. When it comes to Jeeps and ceramics they're peacocks. When it comes to what they wear, there is neither desire nor inspiration. That is not the criterion by which they're measured. They live in too small a place to enjoy the relative anonymity and social mobility that fire both city life and the impulse for self-invention.

Dressing up runs contrary to the character of the place, to the intimate spirit of the suburb, to its snuggling essence. Indeed, in terms of the struggle against the incessant race of modern life, the suburbs give free rein to the secret wish, deep down, to walk around in a faded sweatsuit all day.

The only site in the suburbs where the way of life recalls the big-city experience is the high school, where the competition for attention, the erotic energy, the bodily friction, the impulse to define oneself publicly and the human momentum as a whole are a cut above the surroundings. And the fact is that on occasion a young couple whose freakishness is pleasing to the eye crops up in the city center, or an indifferent student wearing Bathing Ape sneakers may appear. But not this evening. This evening we are in Super Style, clothes for the whole family.

At the corner of 15th Street and Seventh Avenue - sorry, at the top of Habanin Street - I decide what I want from the shoemaker. Let's say I need insoles for the shoes. If that's what it takes, then fine. Luckily he is standing in front of the counter, above me, so that I sit down to remove my shoes in the center of his field of vision.

"Where are those from?"

I knew it. Trust him: A professional is a professional, no matter where.

"Gorgeous, eh? I got them through the Internet," I reply, and also turn them over. God, I'm desperate.

"Handmade," he adds.

Keep going, kid, don't interrupt yourself. What else are we here for?

"It's all leather, the sole, too. But what's that opening in back, what's that for?"

I consider telling him how beautiful I think the opening is, but let it go. There's no reason to push it.

"How much were they?" he asks.

"You don't want to know."

Pause. Reflection. Okay, as far as I'm concerned, I'm done here.

"Don't you think you're throwing away money?" he blurts out. "Believe me, go to Jaffa, they'll make you the same thing for NIS 100."

These are the building blocks of the proteins.