I Feel Better About The Money Already

I found five dollars today. Well I guess you could say that I found five dollars and twenty cents since I picked up two bottles from a parking lot. Well, I found five dollars and twenty cents plus a pair of thinsulate gloves that were frozen to the ground in a parking lot.

I have always picked up gloves in parking lots. Well, not always, but ever since the first winter I was delivering mail. I bought a pair of gloves that year and they just weren’t any good. It turns out that for me a pair of gloves didn’t work for working. My left hand needed a lot more insulation value than the right hand did because it was basically stationary holding the mail while the right hand was in constant motion. The right hand could get away with a much lighter glove than the left. Rescuing solitary gloves from parking lots was the perfect solution and served me well for over thirty years.

It is extremely rare to find an actual pair of gloves that have been abandoned or lost. In fact, in thirty five years, the pair I found today was only the second one. Single gloves or mitts worked perfect, a thick pink ski glove for the left hand and a lightweight woman’s leather glove for the right. A perfect combination! I didn’t care how it looked, just so long as I retired with all of my finger tips. I suppose that I could have bought two different pairs of gloves and tossed out the ones I wouldn’t use, but that would be incredibly wasteful and there just weren’t enough “lefties” out there that wanted to trade. I have kind of tapered off my glove rescue business in recent years, but I am always up for a good quality mini glove or a leather glove whose fingers I can cut off and use to protect my thumb when I am carving.

The two bottles just make sense to pick up. I would pick up a dime if I saw it lying on the ground, so the bottle on the ground is a no brainer. There was this old Chinese gentleman that picked bottles on the walk I used to deliver, and I would leave the bottles that I found on the walk by my relay box for him to pick up. I don’t know if he picked them up, but they were gone by the next day whenever I left them. I had a feeling that collecting bottles was his way of contributing to the household and in some small way he kept his pride. I don’t know that for fact, but when you are delivering mail you have a lot of time to fill in back stories for the people that live on your route.

I kind of feel a little guilty about the five dollars. I found it on the ground near the self serve check out, and I just picked it up and put it in my pocket. I kind of feel that I should have turned it in, but I rationalized a scenario that would let me keep it. No one would come back for the money, and whoever I turned it over to would just pocket it or even worse give it to the store and line Galen Weston’s already too full pockets. I even tucked it into that little useless change pocket on the right side of a pair of jeans, in case I was searched leaving the store. Yeah, I know…

Whenever I have found money on the street, I have no qualms about keeping it, because that money falls under the “finder’s keepers” rule. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t jump up and down on the spot and yell “HUZZAH…HUZZAH, I’m rich!”, I pocket the money and skulk away like a thief in the night. I don’t know if I will be able to keep the five bucks. I still feel guilty about it and I just might slip it into one of the Salvation Army kettles. I know, I’ll buy a lotto ticket in Edmonton and if I win I will drop five bucks next to the self serve checkout at the Superstore. Who knows, maybe that’s where the money came from in the first place and I will just be another in a long line of lotto winners who found the money for the winning ticket.

I feel better about the money already.