In July I received a phone call from a woman who had found my son’s wallet and wanted to be sure we got it back intact. After posting about it on FB, people started telling me their own stories of acts of kindness they’ve experienced. I knew these stories needed to be told. So I asked for submissions and got so many I had to break them out into three separate posts. This is the third one. If you missed the first one, it’s here: Acts of Kindness Series. If you missed the second one, it’s here: Acts of Kindness Too.
Here are more of the stories submitted to me. Again, in their own words:
~While traveling into the “city” with my husband to do some shopping, I had to stop to get gas. When we were pulling out of the gas station onto a busy 4 lane highway, my hubby noticed something in the middle of the road.
“Pull over, pull over” he says. “That was someone’s wallet”.
I finally got pulled over and turned around. Hubby runs out into the highway to retrieve the wallet and as much of the contents as possible. It was a very full wallet with many credit cards, over $300 cash, business cards and such. We decided not to take the wallet back to the gas station as you just never know and tried to get it to the local police station. Now we live in a very rural area right by the state line and police stations are not open “after hours” in the winter. We drove around this very small, wooded community tucked along the shores of Lake Michigan for 20 minutes trying to find the police station only to find it closed with no emergency number. We decided to continue onto our shopping trip and try to find the owner when we returned home as the address for the owner was a town that is more than 40 miles away.
Upon returning home I looked up the owner in the phone book and tried every number possible with no luck. The number that was for the wallet’s owner had been disconnected. After doing more research and making more calls we finally found a number that “could” have been the owner. After more than an hour trying to get an answer I finally got “Jane” on the phone and told her that I had found something that might belong to her.
“You found my dog? Where is my dog?”
“No I don’t have your dog but I have something else that might belong to you.”
“Can I call you back later? I really need to find my dog.”
Now this was a bizarre conversation but I understand the love of a pet so I gave her my number and left it in her hands. The next day she finally called back. When I told her that I had her wallet she didn’t believe me and didn’t even know she had lost it. I gave her my address and arranged a time to meet. The meeting day and time was 2 days away! i felt uncomfortable with that but she told me that anyone who had gone through what we went through to find her had to be honest people and she felt comfortable leaving her wallet in our care. When she finally showed up to get her wallet she told us that she found her dog and that she had just moved out of state so she didn’t know how we had found her. Lucky for her she had written her cell number down and placed it inside her wallet. She insisted on giving hubby a $40 reward which he tried hard not to take but she was adamant. “Jane” had only been gone about 2 minutes when she pulled back in the driveway and gave hubby another $40 as she said she didn’t think that the first amount that she gave him was enough!
Boy that $80 sure did make a nice donation to our local food pantry!
We were on a plane waiting to take off and we were delayed. Eventually we were told that we had to change planes and because we had pulled away from the gate we’d have to go down stairs from the plane, walk into the terminal and up more stairs to a new gate. I had the baby, a diaper bag, a backpack and a small stroller that fit into the overhead compartment. There was no way I could get it all off of the plane. The pilot, copilot and stewardesses all watched me struggle and never did a thing to help. One passenger came over and took the stroller. Another took my backpack and a third took my diaper bag. I walked down the stairs carrying the baby. The passenger with the stroller had it set up at the bottom of the stairs. All those passengers walked with me to the terminal, collapsed the stroller and took it up the stairs, set it up again and walked me to the gate. I didn’t know what to say to them all. “Thank you” didn’t seem like enough but it was all I had.
Prinable Recipe
Ingredients:
3/4 stick (6 TBSP) butter or margarine, melted
½ of a 11.5 oz pkg Keebler Fudge Stripes Dark Chocolate cookies
1 cup chocolate chips
¾ cup white chocolate chips
8 Strawberry Marshmallows, each cut or broken into 8 pieces
1 cup of Raspberry baking chips or of coarsely chopped Wilton Dark Cocoa Raspberry Candy Melts
1 can Sweetened Condensed Milk
Directions:
*Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
*Grease a 9 X 13 baking dish.
*Process the cookies in a food processor until they are fine crumbs.
*Mix the cookies crumbs and the butter or margarine and pat firmly into the bottom of your baking dish.
*Sprinkle with the chocolate chips, then the white chocolate chips, then the Marshmallow pieces, and finally the raspberry baking chips or candy melts.
*Cover with Sweetened Condensed Milk.
*Bake for 25 minutes.
*Remove from oven. Cool for 10 minutes, then run a knife around the edges. Allow to cool completely at room temperature before cutting into squares. Remove from pan. Store in the fridge. Bring to room temperature for serving.