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Dear Reader,
On the way home from our vacation in the Smoky Mountains, my husband and I stopped in a little town called Cherokee and I found the best caramel apple I've had since I lived in Wisconsin. I found something else too, but I almost didn't bother to pick it up because it was so tiny, I thought it must be a kid's toy wallet.
But there it was, lying on the sidewalk, so what the heck. Opened it up, couldn't find any identification, but when I looked in the side of the wallet: one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred and thirty dollars!
It's the weirdest feeling when you find a wallet with $730 dollars in it. Things got serious real fast. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and then I held the wallet down inside of my book bag, so I could discreetly count the bills again. Yep, my math was right the first time. Is this real money? I must've watched way too much TV when I was kid, because the first thing I thought about was that I should smile because I must be on "Candid Camera."
Okay, a wallet, no ID, a whole lotta money in it, what to do? Several troubling scenarios were coming to mind. Since there wasn't any ID or credit cards in the wallet, maybe this was all the money somebody had. I shuddered at the thought. Imagine traveling and you lose every single penny that you brought with you. My husband and I decided to split up and canvass the area.
We spent 30 minutes asking, "Did you lose a wallet?" and when nobody claimed it, I decided to leave my name and cell phone number at the Visitor's Center.
It was our last day in the Smoky Mountains. We were heading back home, but the drive was extremely unsettling because I couldn't get the money out of my mind. Oh boy, did I hope the owner would eventually call. What was I going to do with this money, this money that wasn't mine? I felt like I was carrying stolen goods.
And then my cell phone rang and the man on the other end of the line described the wallet "to a T". Glenn and his wife (I never did get her name) live in Michigan and they were on vacation. The wallet was Glenn's backup wallet. He had cleverly slipped it in his boot, but when he tried on a pair of shoes, the wallet must have worked its way up out of his boot and onto the sidewalk.
Glenn was one happy guy and I was one relieved woman.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
http://www.DearReader.com
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