ELAIC: The Significance of "Heavy Boots"

The importance of the phrase "heavy boots" throughout this story is worth mentioning. The narrator often uses the phrase to describe his feelings of sadness and despair. He says things like "seeing homeless people gives me heavy boots", or "hearing that my best friend's grandma had died gave me heavy boots". Heavy boots, in a literal meaning, would weigh a person down, slow them up, or even keep them in place.

Heavy boots could also make a person fall very quickly to the earth...

The narrator feels like he is staying in place, because he is getting nowhere with finding out what relevance the key he found has to his dad: "In bed that night, I couldn't stop thinking about the key, and how every 2.777 seconds another lock was born in New York." (52) The odds of finding the lock that the key fits are slim to none, which would make for some very, very heavy boots indeed.

Here is a link to the meaning of "heavy boots": http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heavy%20boots