Last Sunday morning, the Daughter Unit, together with the dogs and the Grandson Unit, were doing our customary long walk through the neighborhood when we came upon a rather startling thing – a man’s lost wallet with money, credit cards, and various identification, including a drivers’ license in it, lying close to the sidewalk. It was a slimline leather thing, almost the same dark color as the asphalt paving, and we only spotted it after practically driving the Grandson Unit’s baby stroller over it. It’s not the first time we have found something of the sort while walking. Once it was a woman’s purse, snatched from the front seat of her car not five minutes previously while she went back into the house for something, and once it was a wallet stolen – again from the front seat of the car, the cash taken, and the wallet and ID dumped in the grass at the edge of a vacant lot. In both previous cases, the cash was stolen, but the ID’s had an address on it, and were the owners grateful for getting them back. The owner of the stolen wallet was a resident with a green card, and it would have been a major PITA to get a replacement for it.

But this time, the owner of this lost wallet didn’t live in the neighborhood, but in a gated neighborhood some fifteen minutes distant, a thirtyish guy with a Hispanic name. We were unable to find anything in the wallet with a telephone number on it, and we tried a couple of internet searches. After careful consideration, the Daughter Unit decided that the best thing would be to drive over to the home address listed on the drivers’ license, and return the wallet to the rightful owner, presuming that the address was current. I insisted that she call me before she rang the doorbell of the residence, and again as soon as she returned the wallet to the rightful owner, just on the off-chance that he turn out to be some kind of freak or sex offender. By a stroke of good fortune, the owner of the wallet was driving out of the neighborhood as my daughter was trying to get in, and when she appealed to him for help in getting through the gate, by asking did he know ‘so and so’ – it all ended quite nicely. It turned out that he was a contractor with AT&T doing work in our neighborhood and misplaced the wallet sometime Saturday evening. He was resigned to having to spend all Monday in replacing his ID – he had already cancelled the credit cards, but he was very glad to get the rest of it all returned to him, as it would have been a day off work to get everything else sorted out. Not to put any especial shine on us for being good and honest citizens – but isn’t it a nice thing, living in a high-trust society?
How much longer will that last, I wonder…   This kind of high-trust society can only take so many hits before converting to a low-trust. And that will be a sad thing, I sense.