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I’m going to tell you a story from this past weekend that feels really wild to me, and I swear it’s 100 percent true. Sometimes I’ll meld together a story or two in this newsletter or change some details to avoid violating anybody’s trust in my life, and I try to be upfront about that every time.
But this one is 100 percent true. Hollywood sometimes says at the beginning of a true story that it is “inspired by real events.” This one is real events.
I should also say that there is a decent chance you will get to the end of this story and say, “Uh, I guess you had to be there?” It might only be amazing to me. You tell me.
Okay, so this weekend, I took my kids to a carnival in Connecticut and met up with a bunch of sober friends. It was freaking awesome. It was 100 degrees in an open field, so I felt like a big chunk of fried dough for most of the day. But we had such a blast.
Then I hopped in my van with the three kids and we started to drive back. It’s about an hour drive. As sad as it was to have to leave the carnival, everybody was looking forward to the air conditioning.
As we pulled through the carnival parking lot, I saw a blue purse just laying on the ground. I pulled up beside it and asked one of my kids to jump out and grab it. She said she was too tired and didn’t want to get out of the car. I also felt too tired and lazy and didn’t want to get out of the AC. But finally my daughter got out and grabbed it.
It was a woman’s purse with a lot of important stuff in there: driver’s license, insurance cards, multiple credit cards. We googled her name and came up with a phone number. I tried calling it and texting it, and I think it was the right number. But she didn’t respond.
So we decided, as a family, to drive to this lady’s house and just knock on her door. She lived about a mile away. When we got to her house, we saw her, her husband and two little kids all sitting around an inflatable pool in their front yard. The dad got up and started walking over when he saw a van load of weirdos pull into the driveway.
I walked toward and him and said, “I’m looking for Amanda,” and she got a look on her face that indicated she was Amanda. Then I held up her purse and their jaws dropped. I don’t even think she knew she was missing her wallet.
I handed it to the guy, who seemed very grateful, then got in the car and started to back out. My daughter said, “Hey, here comes the guy,” and I put the window down.
“Take $20, please,” he said, and he tried to hand me a $20 bill.
“Nah, buy something for your kids,” I told him and I backed out.
It was a fun ride home. My kids talked through all the scenarios and realized we did the right thing, and I could see in their faces that they were experiencing the incentives of doing the right thing in real time. I emphasized to them that you gotta try to do the right thing in life because it’s the right thing, not because there might be $20 in it for you. They seemed to get that, and it felt like a moment we’re all going to remember for a long time. I know I felt warm and fuzzy inside.
Here’s a wild kicker to that story, though. When we got home, I threw on some gym clothes and went and worked out. Then I had to get gas in my car and grab a few things at the grocery store. I pulled in the gas station and it was hectic—cars everywhere, people trying to get in and out of pumps.
I filled up quickly, then zipped over to the grocery store. But when I started walking into the store, I realized I did not have my wallet. I tore up my car. I checked my pockets over and over again. It was nowhere.
It dawned on me that maybe it fell out of the car or out of my pocket at the gas station… though I don’t think I’ve ever had something like that happen. I’m usually good about making sure I have a hand on my wallet.
I hopped in the car and drove back to the gas station. I pulled into the lot, which was still a shitshow of people backing in and out of pumps, driving the wrong way through the lot, etc. And there, on the ground near the pump where I had been 10 minutes earlier, laid my wallet, face down, ass up, with cards laying all over the ground.
Nobody had picked it up and walked off with it. Nobody had picked it up and taken it inside to the manager of the gas station. Nobody had picked it up and tried to find me like I had done four hours earlier. It was laying there, waiting for me, amidst the chaos. I couldn’t believe it.
I got back in the car with my wallet and I couldn’t help but laugh. I just returned somebody’s wallet and then almost lost mine for the first time in my life but didn’t? Really weird, right?
By the time I got back to the grocery store, I was thinking a lot about my relationship with a higher power. Lots of people would immediately chalk up my two wallets story to a God moment. I’m not quite there yet but I do like to compile those types of things in a God pile, because it sure feels like the universe telling me something.
I’ve written here many times that I do not have a church or a religion yet. My definition of a higher power is squishy and I can rarely ever verbalize it in a way that somebody else would understand. In my case, it’s something along the lines of the universe, that I trust that when I do the right things, the right things happen for me. Now, sometimes the right thing to happen to me is that I do a nice thing and nobody notices, and nobody gives me money or a pat on the back. It’s just that I learn again that doing the right thing is the right thing.
The cool thing about the way the higher power concept has worked for me is that I find great spiritual value in those things even though I still don’t have a religion that quite works for me.
And the truth is, I don’t need anybody else to understand my higher power. I just need to have one, and work on having a relationship with that higher power. I don’t need you to understand mine, and I don’t need to understand yours.
I also have the part of my brain that says, “Hey, it’s a coincidence that you found one person’s wallet and returned it, and then you lost your wallet and the universe let you have it back.” I was thinking about that last night and I googled God and coincidence and came across the quote that Albert Einstein supposedly gave once, that “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
Either way, I will be thinking about it for a long time. Even if Sunday was just two unlikely things happening on the same afternoon that are freaky and funny coincidences, hey, I’ll take it and be thankful to the universe for that.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A NEW AA WAS HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING because he felt guilty for cheating on his income taxes. His sponsor suggested he make amends, so he sent the IRS the following letter:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I cheated on my taxes and cannot sleep until I make amends. Enclosed is a check for five hundred dollars.
Sincerely,
A reformed citizen.
P.S. If I still can't sleep, I'll send you the balance.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, from November 2008, by Bud B. of Satellite Beach, Florida)
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