I have a knack for finding money and things. It’s not like it would be worth following me around because I find great treasures, but it is often more than chump change.
I found $8 on a shelf at a craft store once. The bills looked like they’d been rolled up in the hand of someone who didn’t want to bother with a wallet. I asked the manager to announce over the speaker that some money had been found. She said, “If I do that, everybody in here will charge up front.”
She suggested that she take it and ask the employees if any of them lost it. I declined. She suggested that the money belonged to the store since it was found in the store. I suggested the money belonged to me because I had it in my hand. I left my phone number in case anyone reported losing money. Nobody ever called, so a few weeks later I gave it to some boys at the grocery store manning a fundraiser table.
I found $5 in a gravel parking lot at the fair once. It probably fell out of someone’s pocket when they were fishing for car keys. The husband and I bought an elephant ear, figuring the money came to the fair and that way it stayed at the fair.
One time I found a Hello Kitty coin purse at a sparsely populated New Jersey outlet mall. Ten minutes later I saw a forlorn little girl, about 7, and asked if she lost a coin purse. Her face lit up like a Christmas tree. It was a great moment, until her mother started unloading on her for being irresponsible. An older sister mouthed thanks while the mom was still railing.
One of my more valuable finds was a new iPhone in the middle of a busy intersection one Saturday morning. The phone was locked, so I had to wait for an incoming call to identify the owner. A woman called with picture ID, and the name on the screen was a derogatory term for the phone owner’s mother.
The mom was glad to pick up the phone. Her son had a few more calls before she got here (I didn’t answer) from girls with picture IDs that looked like bad news. If the girls called again while the mom had possession of the phone, I’m guessing the young man wasn’t going to be that happy to see his phone. Or his mom.
Last spring I nearly ran over a string trimmer in the middle of a side street during a pounding rain. It turned out to be a commercial Weed Eater worth nearly $400. The ink on the tag had run in the rain, but the city and first letter of the business were legible. The business owner was ecstatic someone tracked him down and picked it up that night. In thanks, he offered to later trim a tree, but he never did.
It’s satisfying when you can reunite someone with something they have lost. I’d do it full time if I could, but there’s no money in it, and the finds are few and far between.
