Shoe #132 discovered on June 9, 2007
while driving up the 101,
Santa Margarita, CA
While most were just expressing the common bond of being intrigued with discovering solo shoes, one was about a reunion or sorts
A guy in California wrote me an email because shoe #132 was a shoe very special to him. Here is what he wrote to me…
“Shoe #132: Santa Margarita, California
That shoe belonged to my daughter, Siena. The shoe was purchased in London England. The shoe was hand made. We lost the shoe either in our move to Southern California or in one of our trips between the two areas, when her mother and I were in the process of divorce. That being said the picture has so much weight.
I always take the 101 in both directions, because I love the drive and it is my favorite way to get to Santa Cruz, San Jose, or San Francisco. I know it must be hers because I kept the other one, still in good condition, for some time, in hopes to find the lost one. Then once found I was going to give the pair away, but never could I find this lost shoe.
Eventually, I threw out the lonely one here, in Los Angeles. Its ironic to know all that I had to do was pay attention to the side of the 101. Now the shoe belongs to the road, and has a fitting and warming place in your collection.
Thank you… the emotions swelled in my heart when I saw this… Thank you”
— FUDSON
The story sounded legit, it just felt genuine. But being a bit of a skeptic I wanted to look at shoe #132 and see if it looked like a handmade shoe. Sure enough. The little details, uneven stitching in a few places (although the craftmanship is amazing) convinced me I was dealing with my first ever reunion, although it cannot truly be a reunion since both shoes are gone. It is more like closure, a question gone answered.
I sent him the hi res image of shoe #132 so he can get it printed out if he likes and will always have the memory of his little girl’s handmade shoe that was destined for art :)
Thanks FUDSON. You really added a great story to my One Shoe Diaries. I am going to add shoe #132 to my volume one book. It is too great to be left out of that journey.
And when I titled this blog entry “reunions” i had two in mind. Shoe #132 of course and one more happened over the weekend. Kind of a funny off tangent story.
Before Ivan I had bought a pretty nice modern looking glass and steel office set. Desk, Cabinet, and bookshelf unit. Since it did not have any cloth I was able to clean it and get the stench of hurricane Ivan of it and it was salvageable. So it was stuff into storage along with a few other items we saved. Well we left it unlocked for a short time by mistake, we did get a call from the storage company informing us of that fact and we locked it back asap when we got back to town. Not worrying that someone would have gotten in and stolen some things because it was in small town America right? Wrong!
They did not steal much, not even enough for us to be able to tell they stole anything until we started moving in to our new place and we began asking ourselves…”Where’s my telescope” … “what happened to my massage chair” and “where is my bookshelf unit!” That is when it hit us. That what little stuff we had left from Ivan, we had even less now thanks to a thief. The odd thing was they only took a couple odd things. A mean a massage therapy chair? A metal bookshelf and left the glass shelves and matching desk? My telescope was actually pretty useless because the salt water rusted and corroded it pretty bad.
So fast forward to this past weekend. Sharon and I love to garage sale and it was a perfect saturday to do so. We already had a few good buys under our belt when I spotted a shelf unit exactly like the one that was stolen from us. But it had shelves on it so I knew it was not my actual shelf unit. It had $10 on it, but as you always do, we offered less and paid $7 for it. It was in perfect shape, I paid originally $120 for it new. I now had a complete office set once again. Kinda weird how things just work out sometimes :)