A Karmic Moment?

[tblue37]

129. I hope you weren't being snarky, because such things DO happen.

Here’s an example., I teach college English. Back in 1975, I was using the restroom, when I found on the floor of the stall a folded bill. I picked it up and found that it was a $20 bill, so I put a note up on the mirror saying that if the person who lost it wanted to claim it, she would just need to tell me how much money I found and what condition it was in.

I did this because as one of six kids in a fairly poor family, I knew how scary it could be to lose money. Once my mother accidentally lost a $10 bill at Woolworth's. When she took us all back to the store to look for it, the waitress at the lunch counter came running up to her with it, saying, "Oh, good! I was hoping you would figure out where you lost it and come back!"

That $10 was all the money she had to buy food for the rest of the week for a family of 8. (Fortunately, $10 was worth more in 1960 than it is worth now!)

Remembering that we would have been screwed if that waitress had treated Mom's money as a "windfall" for herself, I have always done my best to locate the owner of any money or anything of value that I find.

Well, as it turns out, the money I found belonged to one of my own students--a yougn single mother of a 3-year-old child. The young woman worked for our university's Buildings and Grounds department--mowing lawns, that sort of thing. She'd had the money folded up tight and stuck into the top pocket of her overalls. It fell out when she was in the stall because she had to take the overalls down to use the toilet. She cried when I gave her ack the money. Just like my mother, she was struggling to care for a child on too little money.

Another example of coincidence (similar to the OP story): I have always been appalled at the way some people drive the speed limit--or even well above the speed limit--no matter how awful the conditions are. Once while driving slowly and carefully in heavy snow (on a 30 mph street), I was passed by a young man in a truck. He was undoubtedly going at least 10 mph over the limit. As he passed me, he lowered his window, flipped me the bird, and yelled an obscenity at me.

Just two blocks later I passed him standing by his truck, which had slid into a ditch. This was back in the days before cell phones, so he had no way of calling for help without walking some distance to find a public phone. I would have located a phone and called in his problem for him, since that is something I have always done, but I was annoyed at his ugliness toward me, so I just waved and smiled at him as I drove by--still going only about 10 mph, because the roads really were slick and the visibility really was bad.

BTW, while my kids were still kids, I also ran a home daycare center, so that I could spend most of their waking hours with them, even though I was still teaching college classes as well. MANY women with small children run home daycares, so the chances of encountering such a person are higher than you might think. Also, the people who run daycares are often just the sort of people who would stop to offer help to someone in distress, since nurturing is a common character trait of people who like to take care of children. If I had been there, I would have also stopped to offer help, and if I had heard that story during my 18 years as a daycare provider, I also would have offered to take the kids for a while until the grandmother could get back on her feet.