Last week we ordered Vietnamese for dinner. I picked Sarah up from daycare, and motored over to pick it up. The bill came to a total of $25.00. I paid. We left.
I was driving out of the parking lot, along a narrow driveway that’s about 1.5 car widths wide, and perpendicular to a busy four-lane highway, when I spotted it: a twenty-dollar bill, just stuck there on the pavement … fluttering, but not going anywhere. Yay! It wasn’t the best place to stop, seeing as though it was a narrow passage and the highway was *right there* – but stop I did. I am not one to turn my nose up at this kind of windfall.
When I grabbed the money I was of exactly two minds. My first honest thought: “I should turn this in to the restaurant so they can give it to the rightful owner when they come looking for it.” This was promptly followed by my second thought, a childhood rhyme that can probably be traced back to days of Christopher Columbus: “Finder’s keepers loser’s weepers.”
I took the cash (thankfully there were no car accidents caused by the hasty exit I made from the car and back again) and we went on our merry way, thinking about our (almost) free dinner.
We got home a few minutes later. I got to the door, struggling to open it while juggling my purse and grasping the already-much-too-overstretched plastic handles of the bag of food. You know where this story is going, don’t you? I dropped the bag. First, there was the horridly heart-wrenching sound of the styrofoam containers CR-racking open, then and the sight of the precious contents spilling out… and most important to me… the spring rolls. I’m not entirely sure if my mouth dried up at the sight, or if my salivary glands kicked into full gear, because dammit, I was hungry and I WAS GOING TO EAT THAT NO MATTER WHAT.
Three spring rolls tumbled outside their Styrofoam shelter: one fell on the doormat, two landed on the wooden boards of our front porch. This part unfolded like a slow-motion murder scene in a horror flick, but the next sped right up. I leapt into action, snatching them up and dropping them back into container. It was clear to me that they could not be contaminated after such a short time on the ground.
And you know what, they tasted very good, although I didn’t tell anyone else about them falling on the ground. I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t kept that twenty dollar bill I wouldn’t have earned the bad karma and dropped the food.
