A kind act remembered
Many years ago, when I was age 13, I had saved $3 with which to buy a baseball glove. A buddy and I rode our bicycles to the store in the little North Carolina town where I was born and grew up. I was dumbstruck when at the store I found the $3 missing–I had put the three $1 bills rolled together in my pants pocket, and they had obviously fallen out while bicycling to the store.
Stricken with disappointment and shame for not having been more careful with the money–$3 at that time to a 13-year-old boy was like hundreds of dollars today–my friend and I started looking under parked cars along the route we had taken, hoping that the bills might have blown under one of them and stuck there. No such luck! As we were doing this, a man who was walking by and knew us, Mr. Lonnie Breedlove, who owned a nearby grocery store, asked what was going on. We, of course, told him my sad story.
Some time later that day, Mr. Breedlove phoned my house to tell that his truck driver who delivered groceries to customers had found the lost money and that I should come by his store and pick it up! By his account, the driver had found it a long block away from our route to the store (he was said to have found it at an intersection on a street parallel to the one we took, the block between the two streets being maybe 200 yards long).
Although at the time I believed his story, as time passed I realized that it didn’t happen. How could three $1 bills have stuck together while being blown some 200 yards (it wasn’t a windy day to begin with)? Would a truck driver, upon finding money in the street–remember, it was a lot of money at that time–have told about it, and then voluntarily given it up to be returned to its rightful owner? Hardly. I realized that, out the kindness of his heart, Mr. Breedlove didn’t want to see a young boy so disappointed, so he concocted the story about it being found and gave me the $3 from his pocket.
Since the incident occurred well over 60 years ago, Mr. Breedlove must have passed away years ago. But I am sure that he built up some good karma for his next life by his kind act.
Stricken with disappointment and shame for not having been more careful with the money–$3 at that time to a 13-year-old boy was like hundreds of dollars today–my friend and I started looking under parked cars along the route we had taken, hoping that the bills might have blown under one of them and stuck there. No such luck! As we were doing this, a man who was walking by and knew us, Mr. Lonnie Breedlove, who owned a nearby grocery store, asked what was going on. We, of course, told him my sad story.
Some time later that day, Mr. Breedlove phoned my house to tell that his truck driver who delivered groceries to customers had found the lost money and that I should come by his store and pick it up! By his account, the driver had found it a long block away from our route to the store (he was said to have found it at an intersection on a street parallel to the one we took, the block between the two streets being maybe 200 yards long).
Although at the time I believed his story, as time passed I realized that it didn’t happen. How could three $1 bills have stuck together while being blown some 200 yards (it wasn’t a windy day to begin with)? Would a truck driver, upon finding money in the street–remember, it was a lot of money at that time–have told about it, and then voluntarily given it up to be returned to its rightful owner? Hardly. I realized that, out the kindness of his heart, Mr. Breedlove didn’t want to see a young boy so disappointed, so he concocted the story about it being found and gave me the $3 from his pocket.
Since the incident occurred well over 60 years ago, Mr. Breedlove must have passed away years ago. But I am sure that he built up some good karma for his next life by his kind act.
posted by Mycroft Watson at 1:46 PM
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
1 Comments:
Enjoyed the reminiscence. From Texas, an old neighbor wonders if the three $1 bills were archived.
Post a Comment
<< Home