Divine grace, indeed
Today at lunchtime I reached into my backpack only to find that my wallet was missing. I searched around in various pockets and thought briefly about what might have happened to it, but my lunchmates were waiting impatiently -- so after asking if one of them could spot me some money, I put it out of my mind until later.
When I got back from lunch, I gave it a little more thought. I had gone bowling last night as part of a team social for work. Because the bowling alley we went to was on a military base, I'd had to get out my wallet to show my ID at the entrance of the base, which meant there was a good chance that I left it at the bowling alley. And yet, I figured one of my coworkers would surely have picked it up and given it back to me. With that in mind, I thought perhaps I'd just left it at home somewhere. I mentally retraced my morning movements around our apartment, but my subconscious couldn't really remember anything. So with more calm than usual, I decided not to worry about it until I got home later that evening and could confirm whether or not my wallet was really lost.
On the metro ride home from work, I pulled out my cellphone for the first time all day. I confess that I have pretty crappy cellphone etiquette -- not that many people besides Alan call me, so usually my cellphone stays buried at the bottom of my purse or backpack, and I can go whole days without checking it. Today, though, I had a missed call from an unknown local number at 10am. I immediately became concerned, and listened to the accompanying voicemail. It turned out to be from someone from my State Farm office, telling me what I expected to hear: that someone had found my wallet. That person had called the only phone number in my wallet -- the one listed on my auto insurance card -- and had left her number with State Farm, and now the State Farm agent was passing along her number to me.
I was halfway home, but got off the train at the next metro station, not only to ensure consistent cellphone reception (although my provider, Verizon, is the only one that gets reception in the underground portions of the DC Metro, it can still be sketchy through tunnels), but also to avoid the embarrassment of having everyone else around me on the train hear that I'd lost my wallet. As I dialed my wallet-finder's number, I noticed with some trepidation that my cellphone battery was down to one bar. Luckily, it held out, my finder picked up, and, happily, she sounded just as relieved as I was that I'd finally contacted her.
"I was about to go over to your house to see if I could find you!" she told me in between my gushes of "oh my gosh, thank you so much" and "I can't believe you've gone to so much trouble already!" We arranged to meet at the metro station where she lived. "Okay, but just wait inside the station, I'll come down there so you don't have to pay the exit fare," she said, to my further disbelief -- so considerate! I told her I'd call again when I got there.
Ten minutes later, we finally met at the turnstiles of the Cleveland Park metro station. Upon seeing her -- a short, motherly lady in her late thirties or forties, Filipino maybe? she had a slight accent that I couldn't quite identify -- I asked, "Can I give you a hug?" She handed back my wallet and I gushed more thanks while searching for a $20 bill I could give her (which I didn't have, but she refused to accept anything anyway). She told me that her grandfather had actually been the one to find it, sitting on top of one of the car racing machines (which I had played) in the arcade room at the bowling alley. She hadn't wanted to leave it with the bowling alley, she said, because she had left her wallet at a Burger King once, and later, after she'd gotten it back from the manager, she found charges on her statement. And -- this was the part that made me feel incredibly grateful on top of everything else -- I learned that she and her grandfather hadn't been at the bowling alley until this morning... which meant that my wallet had sat in the arcade room all night without anyone finding or taking it.
I think I must have shaken her hand a dozen times before we bid goodbye. As I headed back toward the platform, she laughed and waved after me, "Be careful, don't lose it!" My final stroke of good fortune happened several minutes later, as I was trying to send a text message to Alan: my cellphone finally ran out of battery.
On the train ride back home, I couldn't get over just how nice this woman had been, and felt a renewed faith in the goodness of human beings. I had a piece of paper she had brought down with her -- a Mapquest printout showing directions from her address to mine. I thought about using that to send her a thank-you note, but guessed that she didn't include an apartment number with her address. I wondered if I could figure it out with a little online research. It was only then that I realized that the name she had given my State Farm agent, the name which I'd called her by all night -- "Divina Grace" -- might not have been her real name after all.