- As far as stories about a man and sportswear go, this is a touching one
It’s a tale older than time. A guy loses someone he loves, keeps searching for them for many years, and just as he’s about to give up, the fates bring him back together with his lost love. A classic feel-good story.
Only in this case, the lost love is an ice skate. We couldn’t make this up.
It all began “about seven years ago”, which would put us roughly in the year 2013. A 47-year-old man named Jeff Meldrum from Chelsea, Quebec, was ice skating with his son Owen.
Suddenly, Owen fell and injured his chin. Like the good father he is, Meldrum rushed his son to see a doctor at the Wakefield Memorial Hospital, tells CBC. Owen ended up needing some stitches but was otherwise fine.
In his hurry, though, Meldrum left behind his black size 10D right-foot Reebok ice skate. When he realized his mistake, he came back to get his skate only to discover that it had disappeared.
Most people would probably have asked around but soon accepted that the skate was gone and tossed its lonely twin. But Meldrum is a man of principle and he really liked his skates. So, he kept the single left skate.
“I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away because it was brand new. I’d only used it two or three times,” he said.
The left skate was stored in Meldrum’s basement. Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, and months eventually to years. Meldrum kept skating occasionally, but he would always borrow a pair of skates from a friend.
“What I was really afraid of was, the day I throw this out, I’ll find the other one,” he told CBC.
Eventually, the time came for Meldrum and family to move house. While preparing for the move, the man was going through the sports equipment in his basement when he came across his lone skate.
The house he was moving to was smaller than his then-current one, so storage space was at a premium. He decided to make a difficult decision.
He set the skate down on a pile of stuff that was destined to be tossed out.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere…
Let’s now rewind time back to the year when Meldrum first lost his right skate. Élyse Piquette, a woman who lives some six miles from the Meldrum home, was at the time walking along Chemin de la Rivière when she spotted something by the road.
A single black size 10D Reebok ice skate. A right-foot one.
Piquette thought that no one would have intentionally thrown away such an expensive skate and it must have been lost by accident. She picked it up and resolved to find the owner.
She paid for a four-week ad in a local newspaper advertising the discovery of the lost skate, but nothing came of it. Then, she moved online and tried the same on the online classified advertising service Kijiji. Again, nothing.
For some reason, Piquette decided to hang on to the skate and like its twin in the Meldrum house, it ended up lying unused and forgotten in storage for years on end. Finally, after seven years, Piquette thought that she had accrued too much junk and it was time to get rid of some of it. That included our friend the skate.
She hung it by tje laces at a signpost at the end of her driveway, together with some hubcaps and a fireplace poker. People picked up everything but the skate.
It’s understandable, really. Who needs a single right-foot skate?
A Joyous Reunification
On June 22, Meldrum and his son – still with a small scar on his chin – were driving along the road Piquette lived on, when he noticed a single skate hanging off a signpost.
“I said to Owen jokingly, ‘Hey we should turn around — maybe that’s my skate’,” Meldrum said. And that’s what he did. Who knows why, maybe he just had a hunch.
And there it was. The black size 10D right-foot Reebok skate. The one he had been missing all these years.
Well, it’s not necessarily the exact skate. It might just as well be another Reebok skate of the same size that someone else lost. But the time when Piquette originally picked it up aligns with Meldrum losing his skate, so it’s good enough for him.
“This is pretty lucky how this turned out. I have hope, and when I believe that something will come around, it often does,” Meldrum said.
Piquette’s reaction when she was told the story was equally enthusiastic. “That’s amazing! That’s just the happiest possible ending to this!” she exclaimed.
They say that no good deed goes unpunished, but that doesn’t apply here. Meldrum was planning to reward the savior of his skate by having a cake delivered to her house.
He’s still not sure how he lost the skate in the first place. Maybe he left at a bench at the skating rink and it somehow ended up by the side of a road, or maybe he placed it on the roof of his car and just drove off. He doesn’t know and most likely will never find out.
But it doesn’t really matter, now does it? What matters is that Meldrum can finally hit the ice wearing his own pair of skates.