Rearview Mirror With Baby Shoes

As if unwilling to sit still
they hung there, swaying;
soles still clean, undented, unperforated.
Peering over the tall, red dashboard
I was a mole in a moving hideaway
carried forward unwittingly,
the past still front and center.
How could he have ever fit
 
Into those shoes, I thought,
they were doll-sized.  
Suddenly he became a life-sized doll  
on the horizon as if waiting for us to arrive,
wind-blasted and beyond compliance.
'What took you so long?', his tiny lips muttered,
'I am outgrowing myself as you roll away
from me'. I steered the quandry

Into his plushy babble, his eyes wide and blue.
The only thing that seemed to move  
were the shoes, yet not toward or away
but in oscillation.
The odometer read the many hundreds
of miles traveled as we sat and watched them
bobbing along. And where  
 
Had the years gone, they bobbed
gently away in the rearview mirror
of the hulking transport that was
the family car.
The tiny cries became echoes
fading into the clicks of a V8 engine
as the shoes kept running
with the odometer into a marathon
of secrets concealed under the hood
with a slowly corroding radiator
and a cranky carburetor.
 
We sat cradled in the soft, crinkled
leather seats in suspension,  
coasting above the rocky road.
The wrinkled seats were more
worn than the baby shoes
would ever become.
 
            .....