Encounter with the Universe Part 4 Yesterday I met my cousin for a coffee. He lives in Tokyo and visits Toronto once or twice a year. After, he said he’d walk me to my streetcar stop. Instead of crossing the wide, busy street to the closest stop, we decided, non-intuitively, to turn onto College Street and walk a few blocks up to a further stop. There on the sidewalk was a bright crisp $20 bill. I looked around. The sidewalk was somehow free of pedestrians in both directions. No one was frantically retracing her steps, eyes to the ground. Traffic moved blithely on. I felt a pang of sorrow for the person who had dropped it. The previous day, I had dropped a favourite suede glove in a drugstore. I retraced my steps over and over again, but couldn’t find it. Now here was a $20 bill at my feet. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. And it is still in my pocket. I just checked craigslist lost and found wondering if I should post a message: Found, $20 cash. Call xxx-xxxx. Spousal unit said to break it into small bills and give it to homeless people. Hubski, what would you do?
Myself and two friends once found a $20 on the ground in a similar fashion. We spent $17 on ice cream sundaes, $1 in quarters on toys from a vending machine, and $2 on two scratch and win tickets. One we scratched off and got nothing, the other we put, unscratched, in the exact same spot as where we found the $20.
hmmm, maybe someone is playing it forward by leaving the $20 for me. Next time I'm at a drivethrough (we have a lot of those in Kanada), I'll pay for the person behind me... particularly if from my rearview window, it looks like a distraught parent with screaming kids.
So glad to hear that -- and to have you call me on binary thinking. Bravo! Note: Random readers, OftenBen is referring to an intense previous post.
I've been lucky enough to find money three times: a 20, a 20, and a Benji. I found the 100 when I was 12 years old. I don't have a fucking clue what I spent it on, but in the fascist state of my father's household at the time, $100 was, what I came to find out later, what my mother was allowed to use to raise us with per week. So it was a windfall for me. I think I bought lunch for myself and my friends for the first time in my life.
I found a diamond ring in a parking lot once. It was outside a fairly romantic restaurant. I envisioned all sorts of horrific scenarios where someone lost this heirloom. I put up signs all over the building, left my name with the restaurant. Never got a call. I gave it two months. Then I took it to a jeweler at the mall. They ran it through the ultrasonic cleaner and put it in their conductivity meter. Yeah, Moissanite or CZ. The scenarios in my head changed tenor. I listed it on eBay and included the story of its provenance. Think I made $250 off it or something. All in all, pretty dope.
Buy food. If you wanted to be noble about it, donate it to something you care about. I don't much see the point.