The Return Of The Prodigal Wallet - A Short Holiday Story

Aside from drowning, there is no sinking feeling like the sinking feeling of reaching for your wallet and finding it isn’t there. That happened to me today. I checked the floor. Nope. Didn’t drop it. How about the car? I’d just returned from a grocery run. No wallet there either. I even checked the freezer because of something similar that happened years ago with a partial denture of mine. Embarrassing.

Well then, maybe I left it at the store. Drove to the store. No one had turned in a wallet to customer service or to the manager, but they took my number in case someone did.

Took some deeeeep breaths and emptied my alleged mind of imagined catastrophes about going to Debtors Prison because an identity thief had emptied my account then stretched my credit/debit limits to the felony level. Maybe I’d be dragged through the streets behind an ox cart and flogged by hags and then strapped to a dunking stool. 

At the very least there were the hassles of replacing my plastic self with the credit union, DMV, Veterans Adminstration, pharmacies, etc. The drowning parallel holds here too. The more you thrash around in a panic, the quicker your demise. In this case, the more hidden the wallet stays. So, I clammed down and drove home. On the way the resident manager of the apartment complex where I live rang my ringer. Said a man had found my wallet and was returning it.

I pulled into my parking space and there he was, a smile on his face and my wallet in his hand. I only had $3 cash, which was much too paltry a reward, so I asked if he had any daughters. He did. I gave him a beautifully detailed Santa doll in an Eskimo parka made of reindeer hide – which might have made Dasher, Prancer, Donner, Blitzen and the rest of the sleigh pullers nervous. The doll had been a gift to me, but I felt the giver would approve if I paid it forward. (To my relief, she did.)

And the man who returned my wallet? He’s Hispanic. Name’s Campos. I thought it should be Santos.

 Or maybe Santo Campos.

Happy holidays.

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Comments?

You always make my days brighter  -- Carol
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What a great story, Mike, thanks so much! – Amanda

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Holyfield (Santos Campos, or vice versa). I have a client by that name, or actually a variation, Hollyfield. – Trog

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Thanks for the link and the story -- glad it had a happy ending!  Wishing you a Merry Christmas and the best of it all for the coming year -- Cynthia

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Thank You for sending me this link.. I very much enjoyed the wallet story.  Happy Holidays, my friend. -- Pandora

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I liked them all, of course. The most moving one was the last one about the purse left on top of the car. Like most of us, been there, etc. A lousy feeling indeed.
Thanks for keeping in touch this way. It reminds me of good times in my former life and that outweighs the others. I'm thankful you are still making a difference to many.Merry Christmas! -- Kent

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Sweet story. Anything you write about is so easy, funny and sweet.
 Merry Christmas! -- Mimi
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Your stories are way too few and far between. Not that I want you to lose your wallet more often, but I'm sure there are other stories rolling around with your marbles that you could share?  Are you moving to Maine? I guess I missed that. -- Beaty

No.  I’m staying put.  Rusty is moving, as noted in the next post.
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This is great and I'm passing it along to those friends and family I know will appreciate it. You've been a master story teller and you and I have history.

Things are in motion with the magazine and on the home front, as well. Thanks to Linked In and Facebook, we've really grown and that's bringing clients into the writing and editing business as well.

So, this will be my last Christmas in Seattle. Tom Robbins is still living in LaConner and I've checked the area out. It hasn't changed much since I lived there before. So I expect that by this time next year, I'll be set up in a quiet place in a community I served well once and stand to serve well again. It'll be a little tougher for out of staters to visit but then it's also a good reason for them to bring their own sleeping bag and plan on staying a stretch.  -- Rusty

Thank you for your embarrassingly generous praise.  I hope your move is as hassle free as any move can be, which ain't much.

I know the area where you're bound. I'd go with my mom when she visited friends in Linden. Me, I'd rather live in Copalis or Pacific Beach. When I was kidlet we'd find glass globe fishing floats in twine netting that had drifted in on the Japanese Current. In later years the floats were plastic and not nearly as desirable as beachcombing loot.

Mom would visit her author pal Norah Berg who lived in a ramshackle place the color of driftwood on the beach at Copalis with her big fat alcoholic husband, a retired Marine named Sarge who had a roadmap face and a big red W.C. Fields nose. Norah wrote a book about those times:

lady on the beach norah berg - Google Search

I remember a story Norah told on herself. Seems she had been mushroom hunting in the woods near her place when she happened on an injun burial ground. Some of the skeletons were exposed, probably dug up by our little forest friends. Norah espied some trading bead jewelry on a bone, which she picked up, took home and popped into a hot oven to bake the dried flesh off the bone and free up the pretties.

About that time her friend and neighbor, the chief of the Moclips tribe, whose burial ground Norah had looted, dropped by for a visit and took a seat at the kitchen table. He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. 

"Norah," he said. "Something's burning."

Norah burst into tears and sobbed, "I may have one of your relatives in the oven!"

The chief got up, opened the oven door, peered in for a moment, closed the oven door and sat back down. During a break in Norah's sobbing he said, "Norah, if anyone's gonna have that stuff, I'd just as soon it be you."

And happy holidays to you, sir.

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I bought that book for my mom as a Christmas gift ! She, like me, loves the Copalis area. This will be a great story to share with mom .  Great story!  Warms my heart to think of someone doing the right thing which led to a huge relief for someone and a child being generously rewarded.  – Tammy

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I once found a wallet in an overcrowded street on a Saturday afternoon. A quick look around, trying to identify an anguished glance in someone's face, but no...nothing.

The wallet held the equivalent of maybe 20 bucks in bills and petty cash. The ID card showed the face of a lovely teen girl, from a town 150 miles away. I was already too old for teens.

So I rushed to the nearest police station, hoping to meet the distressed owner busy declaring the loss.  But no one in sight.

In the lost/found property office was a young slob, his feet on the counter, narrating his last skiing week-end on the phone.  After 20 minutes, I had enough about the contemplation of his soles, so I left the office without waving good-bye.

Once home, I called the lost property service at the same police station, saying that I had found a wallet, and I wished to give my phone and address in case the owner was still in town and wished to retrieve it.

“Sorry, but it doesn't work that way!  You have to come and drop it at the station and fill a few forms.”

I recognized the voice of the young punk.

I told him that's exactly what I had done, but all I found there was a sucker on the phone who didn't pay any attention to me for 20 minutes, busy as he was with the glorious narration of his skiing holiday.

Deep silence on the other end of the line.

I finally just mail the wallet to its owner. I got at thank you letter a few days later.

 -- Gerard

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Dang!  Where did you get/develop that strong gift for narrative structure?  Wallet to good ethnic Xmas and gift giving and eskimos too.  All in such a short few paragraphs.  Bravo!.  Wish i could do that! -- Galen

Practice. Reading a lot of John O'Hara's stuff at an early age helped. He was a genius with dialogue. So was Steinbeck.

Plus I've always had a pedantic streak. The hard part was learning to curb my lecturing instinct and write for the mind's ear. People don't converse or think in complete sentences. However I still try to abide by The Rules as set forth in various manuals of style (the best is Chicago's), and to me, a misspelled word is as unsettling  as a dab of  spinach on the front teeth of a first date.

Another author I liked was all the rage with one book in the 70s. Robert Pirsig, author of Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He once taught English composition at a college in Montana. His first assignment was to make students write x amount of words about a penny, maybe two or three pages on lined notebook paper. Once the whining stopped and the writing started, the kids would really get into the assignment and would fill up page after page about that penny; where it had been, a moment in the life of someone who held it, how it served as an electrical conduit to bring the light to a darkened house, and so on.

Pirsig wrote one other book after that. Lila. A stinker.

Thank you for the compliment.

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I went to a friend's house some years ago to deliver a bag of cookies I had made for her, and then I was off to Christmas shop with $180 in twenty dollar bills. I loaded my coat in the back seat, and then headed to the mall across town. I found a parking space and reached for my purse.  No purse.

I did the same as you did. I looked in my pockets, around the car on the ground, all around the front and back seats of my car. I drove back to my friend's house, and also searched the ground where I had parked.  Nope. Gone.

I drove home with no money, no form of ID, no credit card, AAA card, insurance card. I walked into my house dejected, got a piece of paper to make a list of everything I would have to replace, who to call, and wondered how much money I had left in my savings account to buy a gift or two.

Right then the phone rang. It was a man who lived two blocks from my friend's house, calling to have me identify a purse he had found. He had tried to recover as much of the contents as he could.  Oh god. I surmised I had laid my little purse on top of my car.  My purse had gone flying when I was on the road. The man had been a few cars behind me and saw it happen.  He retrieved as much as he could and found my address and phone number on my blank checks.

I drove to the address he gave me on the phone. He answered the door, a man about my age. He apologized for maybe not finding everything, and handed me my purse, my checkbook, insurance card, credit card, license, and my AAA card.  Then he gave me a handful of twenty dollar bills. He asked me how much I had lost, and as I counted it, I paused, and looked up at him with tears in my eyes. "Nothing," I said.  He had searched two icy slippery blocks, dodging traffic, and found them all.

 "I haven't lost one thing because of you," I said.  He smiled and said he was glad. It was three days before Christmas, and I tried to give him one of the twenties, feeling it wasn't enough for all he had done out in the freezing wind. He wouldn't take it. He said what good people say. He said that he didn't want any reward and hoped that if he lost his wallet one day, someone would return it intact. I hugged him again and wished him a Merry Christmas.

That was ten years ago, and I still vividly remember what he looked like and how grateful I was that in a world where people often don't do the right thing, my purse fell into the hands of an honest man with a good heart.  – Zoey

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Nice story. Happy holidays. – Lowell D.

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Wonderful holiday story!  -- Julisari

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Sweet! – Lynda

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