Yesterday I used the car for the first time since last Saturday nite, when our triplet grandchildren had been here for my husband’s birthday party. Afterward I drove them back to their car, which was parked a couple of blocks away. When I opened my new car yesterday to put something in the back seat, I spied the not-so-little sparkly pink plastic bow from Margi’s party shoes on the floor. She may not even have noticed she’d lost it. So I carefully taped it to a sturdy card, tucked it into an envelope, and handed it to my husband this morning as we went out to get groceries at Haymarket – he had something else needing to be mailed, so was going to the post office en route while I negotiated the street vendors.
As he opened the post office door I said, “Don’t forget to mail Margi’s letter.” He looked down and said, “Oh, no!” It had slipped out of his gloved hand as we’d walked the 10 min up Hanover street. I quickly retraced our steps, searched the lobby chair where he’d sat to bundle up, and went back up to our condo to look. No letter. I went back down and told the concierge what had happened just as he returned, hoping I’d found it. When we said no, he slumped and said, “I’m going to kill myself.”
With heavy heart, I trudged back out the door and back down Hanover, regretting having told my son that we’d found it, and hoping he hadn’t yet told Margi. How could we have lost what I knew was a precious item after it turned up so miraculously? When I returned to the lobby with my fruit and vegetables, the concierge beamed. “Guess what? A lovely young couple found your letter on the street and brought it back to the return address. They thought it might be important because it obviously had something special in it.” (Thank you, daughter-in-law, for that distinctive return address stamp I now use on all my mail!)
And thank you to our concierge for going all out to tell that young couple how grateful the grandma and grampa of that little girl would be that they could get her sparkly bow back to her in time for Thanksgiving. As my husband later remarked, “We live in a real neighborhood.”
Nice story. Thanks for sharing.