National Post (National Edition)
ONE GOOD TURN...
Homeless woman who turned in purse stuffed with cash gets a little help from new friends.
The world is full of stories of misery, but there are precious moments when human goodness shines through: The New York cop who bought shoes for a homeless guy without them; the Toronto man who conjured up $800,000 for a bullied bus monitor in Rochester, N.Y., through an Internet plea.
And then there is the woman from Calgary, a woman who went above and beyond the call of duty, her story made all the more remarkable because she was herself homeless.
She was down on her luck and living in a YWCA homeless shelter and feeling desperate; 62 years old.
She needed a break and found a purse on the street stuffed with $10,000; a woman whose first thought upon finding the loot wasn’t — “Yippee! I just won the lottery” — but: “How can I return this to the person it belongs to because they must be frantic to find it?”
I spoke to her on Monday about what happened.
“I had come out of a convenience store and there was a car parked there,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous.
“Something was leaning against the back door and the car drove off and I walked over to see what it was, and it was a purse.
“I ran after the car waving the purse but the people didn’t see me so I took it back to the ‘Y’ and opened it to look for a phone number. I couldn’t find one, but then I found this wad of cash, of hundred dollar bills.
“I never thought about keeping the money. It wasn’t mine. I grew up going to church. I sang in the choir. And you don’t keep something that
I am so thankful to the people who donated money
doesn’t belong to you. “I don’t know how you could.” Let’s think about that, shall we: You are homeless. You are desperate. You find $10,000. And you think of the person who lost the money, not of your own financial worries, like not having a roof over your head. The purse was found in October and the story, as it evolved and became public, struck Calgarians in a soft and squishy place and was ultimately voted by CBC viewers as the city’s “most heartwarming story of 2012.”
And here’s why: the money was reunited with its rightful owner. They met with the woman, thanked her profusely and presented her with a $500 reward.
There were other acts of kindness. A homeowner with an empty room to rent invited the woman to take it over, at no charge.
“I was so grateful, but I really felt that I needed to be independent,” she says. “Plus, they had two dogs and I have a cat.”
A trust was established in the woman’s name at a local bank. Donations didn’t pour in, but they kept coming in a trickle, in dollar amounts ranging from four bucks to $1,000, and two weeks ago the Good Samaritan had enough cash in the trust to move out of the shelter and into a rent-subsidized seniors’ complex.
“It is a bachelor suite,” she tells me. “And it is really starting to feel like home. I am just so thankful to the people that donated money on my behalf.
“I think it says a lot about human nature and, personally, I think a lot of people — had they found that money in the purse — would have done exactly what I did.”