Paying it Forward (without realising it)

 Hi there

In my last blog, I told how I'd lost my SuperGold Card and before I'd even made it home after my trip to town some kind person had handed it in to the Wellington Central Police Station.

Well, exactly one week later, after seeing the Rita Angus Art Exhibition at Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand, I was waiting at the Courtenay Place bus stop to go home.  My bus arrived, I got on, flashing my SuperGold Card to the driver. The bus was stationary, and with folk still exiting via the back door as I went to sit down -

Wait-!  What was on the seat I was about to plonk down on?  A wallet???

Now, I'm a shy person in public.  I would never dream of being the star of my own life if there were  people around.  But -

"Wait!  Wait!  Stop the bus!"  I raced up to the back door, and hollered through it, "Who's left their wallet here?"

The ex-passengers were milling out around the area.  Nobody looked back at me (except every passenger in the bus).  I rushed down the aisle to the bus driver, waving the wallet.  "Here, here, somebody's left this-"

She took the wallet and looked inside. "There's a lot of money in here," she said.

All we passengers went "Ooooh..."

"A heck of a lot of money-"

"Ooooohhh ...."

The driver told us there was also a SuperGold Card in the wallet.  One passenger pointed out the window. She said that she thought an older gentleman wandering away was a guy who had exited our bus.

The bus driver ran out of the bus, engine still running and, darn-it, I couldn't see what was going on but the woman opposite me provided a running monologue.  "The wallet's his!"  Everybody cheered.

The driver came back.  "There was $4000 in the wallet," she told us all.

"-Oooooohhhh....."

It wasnt until that evening that I thought about my SuperGold Card loss and how it was found .  Had today's episode been The Fickle Finger of Fate's way of me paying it forward?  I like to think so.  And I like to think that the elderly gentleman who got his SuperGold Card and his $4000 back would somehow, too, pass it forward (even if he did it unconsciously, like I had done)...

above. When I was younger, Wellington had trams, not buses.  Here is a mural on the side of a shop in the suburb of Kilbirnie.