Just in case you were worried I wanted to let you know that there are still good people out there. Not hero’s or saints or do-gooders... just regular ole good folk.
Never let an incident pass where you don’t take notice of it.
Ferris went to a Mets game last week. It was a beautiful day for a ball game, but he ended up leaving the game a little early because he was worried he had left his car unlocked. Perhaps it was in his flustered departure that he lost his cell phone. He discovered the loss just before reaching his car on the shuttle to the parking lot.
He and his buddy repeatedly called his phone on their drive home. Hoping.
They were very surprised when a call came in from Ferris' phone!
The man on the phone said in a heavy accent,
“Hey, who’re you?”
Ferris explained that it was his phone, and that he had just lost it at the Mets game.
The man quickly gave Ferris his Brooklyn address.
Ferris called home and explained the story, and asking for advice.
what to do what do to....
I was trying to think quickly through all the scenarios.
I wasn't all that comfortable giving out our home address, and I didn't want to have this man have to pay for mailing it… while I was working my way through variations on the mailing scenario, my helpful and often too trusting wife shouts out -
"We'll go get it!"
I pause, my eyebrow raises curiously.
"Yah!, I am off tomorrow so Ferris and I can take a ride to Brooklyn to pick it up!"
Somewhat hesitantly I tell Ferris to call the guy back and tell him we'll come pick it up in the morning.
I hang up.
I have the immediate thought that this is a trap and my wife and son are going to be robbed and beaten on the bad streets of Brooklyn. So I start with my niggling nagging advice... don't get out of the car if it looks shady, leave your purse at home...and on and on I go. Sometimes… you really have to give the woman credit for just staying in the room with me.
Ferris speaks with the man from Brooklyn again – the man explains he will be working the next day, and will leave the phone with his father who lives in the same Brooklyn neighborhood just down the street.
In the mean time, my clever wife calls The Brother in Law With Brooklyn Friends to get the low down on the neighborhood.
His response was - it’s a safe neighborhood, tho not a nice neighborhood. We're not talking Park Slope here....
The two adventurers finally get to Brooklyn late the next morning after a couple of grueling hours on the heavily trafficked and under construction BQE.
Ferris, riding shotgun, shouts out to stop when he spies the street number they had been given. Unexpectedly, it’s an apartment building. They were only given a street number, not an apartment number.
Undaunted he approaches two women chatting on the stoop. He explains the story and while they are unsure exactly, they suggest he start on the fourth floor.
He got lucky. He again explained his story to an elderly woman behind the first door he knocked on. She seemed confused, having no idea about any phone – when a mans voice came barreling down the hall.
“The phone!? Yeah, I have the phone!.”
To thank him for his generosity, Ferris gave the man a brand new Mets hat he had gotten last year but never worn.
As Ferris was getting back in to the car with my waiting wife the old man comes out to wave them off.
“Look what I got” he calls out to the ladies on the stoop, smiling and proudly donning his new cap.
A good man in Brooklyn, raised his son to be a good man.
Not a hero. Simply a regular good guy.
It was just a cell phone.
But don't let even a small kindness go unnoticed.
