my superwallet

i want to tell you all how awesome my wallet is. it appears to be nothing fancy, being a nice dark red leather with an inner lining of manmade materials. but it has superpowers like a boomerang, because every time i lose it, it comes back to me.

rewind two years or so. i lose my wallet in the dead of winter, shortly after i bought it. after it didn't turn up for a couple of months, i got new cards and drivers' license and social security card. a full five months after i lost it, someone returned it to me. (his name was Butch or Spike or Beast or something, but whatever it was, i was kind of afraid to go to his house by myself.) i had apparently dropped it in a gutter a few blocks from a friend's house, and it got covered with snow. after the snow melted the wallet was discovered, crusty and soggy but still very full of important things like $46 and a valid duplicate drivers license, although i decided to keep my newer one as the picture was a lot better.

on friday, i sat my wallet on my car roof after paying-at-the-pump for some (really expensive) gas. then i drove off without retrieving the wallet from the roof. a few hours later i discovered my error, and retraced my earlier route (nearly 15 miles!) trying to find it. then, for the second time, a stranger contacted me and told me she'd found my wallet.

now, i've had this wallet for a long time, and it's been through a lot, such as traveling to several countries and spending a lot of time in a slushy gutter. the pockets inside are a little stretched out and things kind of fall out of it if you're not careful.

anyways, the lady said most things had fallen out of my wallet, and were scattered all over the side of the road. she took the time to hunt until she found all she could. she put it all in a bag and returned it to me. isn't that awesome?

i don't have much faith in humanity (fallen nature and all that), but my guess is that most people would return a wallet to its rightful owner. i don't know if everyone would take the time to pick everything up. anyways, it's pretty neat that strangers have been good to me all this time. i actually planned to put the wallet into retirement last week when i bought a new one. but the new one didn't work very well, and i had to reenlist my red wallet to active duty. then i almost lost it again. the moral of the story is, it's only when you lose something do you realize how much it's really worth. :)