Friday, June 27, 2008

Honestly


Today I flagged down a taxi and when I went to get in I saw something on the back seat that perhaps a previous passenger had left. I pointed it out to the driver and he turned around and picked it up and opened it. It looked like a large fancy scientific calculator that some student had left. I got in and he asked if it was okay to go back to where he had let his last passenger off. It was only about a block away – though to get there we had to drive across a field to where a paved sidewalk too small for a car goes on up the hill into a crowded low cost boarding house area. Three young guys were sitting on a nearby porch talking. I heard the driver ask them about a person in a green shirt and they grunted and pointed up the hill (where cars cannot go) and one of them came down and got the calculator.

We took off and the driver said he often finds things people leave behind even cellphones. He said he always returns them because there’s One who knows, and he pointed to the sky. It was very heartening to see an ordinary citizen going out of his way to return a lost item. (And he didn’t turn the meter on until he was back on the main road where I had flagged him down!)

A friend was telling me about her niece who works at a gas station. She recently got a very nice cellphone for about 1/4th of the cost of a used phone from a taxi driver who regularly fills up at that station. He apparently often finds cell phones left behind in his taxi. Instead of bothering to try to return them he just sells them cheap to the gas station employees. He has even found nice camera phones. He has found as many as four in the course of one week. Whenever he shows up to fill up with gas, the employees come running to see if he has any new cellphones for sale.

What a world.


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