Sunday Morning: Doing the Right Thing

I am waking up slowly this morning. Got up, came downstairs, put on some snow boots, and walked the dogs. We go over by the woods at Rock Creek, they like to sniff around where the deer have been. In the snow, halfway down a block where nobody lives, I found a woman's purse in the snow.

I picked it up and carried it with me. There was also a ballpoint pen with the name of a church on it in the snow, too, I picked that up as well. The dogs and I went over to the woods and they played, throwing the snow with their noses, rolling in it, wrestling, tangling their leashes. The strap on the purse had broken, so I held it by the ... I don't know what you call it, the part that opens. It was a small black leather one.

When the dogs had done their business we headed home again. A guy had a little tractor and was plowing the sidewalk in front of the school and in front of his house. A snow-plow came around the corner, too, and drove over the snow where I had found the purse. So it was good I had it.

Some guys don't like to hold a lady's purse. I'm one of them. I can't tell you why.

My thermometer is in the sun, and it says it's sixty degrees outside. When I first went out I thought maybe it was, not that warm, but warm. The first blast of a breeze though disproved that theory. Snow is not melting, it is colder than a ... it is very cold out there, still.

I had started the coffee maker before I went out, and when I came back indoors the kitchen had a nice smell but I didn't pour a cup quite yet. I set the purse on the counter and went through it, looking at the cards. There was a Costco card, a hair appointment card, something from a church, a little notebook with heartwarming sayings written in it and a shopping list. Ah, there you go, an ID from work. This is a government worker, there's her picture, hmm, not bad.

I came over to the laptop and put her name into Google. A white-pages site came up, and it gave an address right here in the neighborhood, in fact it was on the street where I found the purse. She had an unusual name with a unique spelling, her name alone brought up only one instance. I called her number and got voicemail.

Man, that coffee looked good.

I put the snow-boots back on, and picked up two packages of trash that needed to go out. Nobody felt like carrying them out into the snow yesterday, so they were by the door, a plastic bag and a box with some broken glass in it, from a picture frame that had fallen sometime over the last year, which we discovered when we moved the TV out of the family room yesterday, long story.

I live on the corner of two streets, this lady's address was on one of them. I took a guess and went left, but the numbers got smaller and so I turned around. There is a stretch of road with a school and no houses, which goes down into the woods to an apartment complex. My daughter used to have a friend there who was Polish, so I always think of it as a Polish neighborhood, but I was talking recently to a guy who lives there, he came to one of our gigs, and he said no, there might be one Polish family. This lady had a name that is probably Italian, possibly Iranian or something. It was an unusual name.

I walked in the street by the school, but they had the sidewalk cleared at the apartments, so I used that. Looks like somebody there has a snow-blower. I was walking along carrying this purse, and there were a few cars out but not many, nobody I knew.

Luckily the lady's apartment was the second one, I didn't have to look all over for it. There were cars parked in a row, and an empty spot in front of this apartment. I hoped I didn't find out that she had disappeared overnight, and that I had the only evidence of her disappearance, or that I'd find a bloody mess where she's been killed after they robbed her, or something. I hoped it was a girl who maybe had gone out for some drinks on a Saturday night and didn't notice that her purse-strap had broken as she walked unsteadily home, something pleasant. I had found it in a weird place, not where somebody would be likely to walk at night, as I knocked on the door I figured I'd find out pretty soon what had happened.

I heard sounds inside and then they stopped. Well I guess if I was a lady looking out through my peephole and saw me I might not throw the door open. I hadn't had a shower, I had run a brush through my hair so that wasn't too bad but you know my hair is long, I had on some flannel pants and a sweat shirt, and a jacket. The sounds stopped and I was about to knock again when the knob turned and then the door opened.

It was the lady on the ID. I held up the purse and she smiled. "I think you want this," I told her, and I handed it to her. I was glad to get it out of my hands.

She was definitely happy to get it. She said they had come home from a restaurant in Baltimore last night and discovered it was missing, and had called the restaurant to check. Even though she had stuff from a Christian church in her purse, I figured that the word "restaurant" meant "bar," and I did not think it was likely she went out to Baltimore for dinner. I know someone who went to Baltimore yesterday and they said it took three hours to get back in the snow, where it should be well less than an hour. The roads were really bad yesterday, there were wrecks everywhere, events were canceled, I don't know who would go to Baltimore for dinner on a day like that. So, whatever, I don't care what she did last night or if she lies about it, here's your purse lady.

She asked me if she could give me something and I said no. There was some money in there, I knew, if I wanted her money I would have taken it already. Once when I was young and poor I did that, I found a wallet with a few hundred bucks in it, and I took the money and put the wallet in a hiding place and called the person and told them where it was. They didn't even know they'd lost it yet. I figured it was a surcharge for leaving their wallet on the sidewalk, price you pay. Was that the wrong thing to do? I don't know, they did get their credit cards and stuff back, I guess it won't end up being a new parable in the Bible or anything but it could have been worse. The Parable of Serendipitous Opportunity. No, I don't think so.

The lady was very cheerful and glad to see her purse. She didn't look as glamorous as her government ID photograph, well I guess that can go either way. I work with people whose ID's don't look anything like them. Sunday morning, I suppose she didn't have any make-up on or whatever they do, she was just hanging out at home after a night of ... eating at a restaurant in Baltimore. She embarrassed me with her energy and cheerfulness, I still hadn't had any coffee yet, I had had a sip of whiskey last night myself, and I was relatively apathetic about this lady and her life.

I stood on her doorstep for about a minute, saying the things that made this random encounter less awkward. She was trying to figure out my motives and how I happened to have her purse, and I was somewhat curious about how it had ended up where it was, but basically it was a conversation with a purpose, I had found her purse and was returning it to her, she was showing appreciation and checking if I was a bad guy who had stolen it or something.

I walked home without a purse in my hand. The wind kicked up sometimes and man, it was cold. The zipper on my jacket doesn't always work, and so I had it unzipped and unbuttoned, and those surprise blasts hit me hard. The lady's cell phone was missing, so I kicked the snow where I had found the purse to see if it was there, but I didn't see it.

I was thinking about doing the right thing. I know people who think that morality comes from God, and only Christians can do the right thing. I was thinking about Wiccans, who are about as not-Christian as you can be, and the ones I have known make really sure to do the right thing all the time, because they know people are judging them. And they also believe that everything comes back to you threefold, which I hope is not true. Well, I don't see how that would work, anyway. I have known atheists, lots of them, and they seem like good people too, they do the right thing, they help you out when you need it, and why? Not because they're afraid of the judgment of God, that's for sure, and the ones I knew didn't wear "Kiss me I'm an Atheist" buttons or anything, they were just scientists who didn't believe in things they couldn't see or measure. I don't think they did the right thing to make a point, or even because they calculated that their payoffs would be greater if they used the Cooperate rather than Defect strategy, assuming this was an iterated game.

No, you don't have to be a Christian to do good things, and you don't have to have an ulterior motive. It's going to come down to the economic principle we call the Golden Rule. Because we're all in this together, it is better for us to help one another, because at some point we might need the help. It feels good to do good things, and somewhere in your mind you think about how it would be if it was turned around. What if this lady found my wallet in the snow, what would she do? I think she would do just what I did. I know she's a Christian, I saw the papers in her purse, but I don't think she would have returned my wallet because of something Jesus said. She would have done it for the same reason I brought her purse to her, because we're all in this together.