Areas of Unrest

22 June 1999 - Karmic Debt Repaid

When I was in New York in September, I went to the supermarket with my mother and found a wallet in the parking lot. I did the sensible thing and brought it in to the store manager's desk.

A couple of months later, I found a wallet in the parking lot at a housewares store here. Again, I brought it to the customer service desk at the store. This time somebody else was waiting in line at the desk and said something to me about what a good person I was to do that. It had never occurred to me to do anything else.

Well, I obviously built up good karma and it paid off today. I stopped for gas on the way to work and reached for my wallet to get my credit card out. (I always use the pay at the pump readers with the Visa card that gets me frequent flyer miles.) And my wallet wasn't in the compartment of my pocketbook that it was supposed to be in. I thought that perhaps I had mistakenly put it in the wrong compartment, but a quick search turned up nothing. The cloth change purse I use for cash was there, so I paid cash for the gas and went back home in a slight panic.

First I called work to say I might be in a bit late and to get someone else to cover the meeting I was supposed to handle for my boss. Then I emptied my pocketbook. No wallet. I went through the pockets of the clothes I had worn yesterday. No wallet. There was just one hope left.

I knew I had it with me last night at the supermarket, because I'd used the ATM in the market. So I drove over to Ralph's and found the manager. I was terrified I'd have a car accident on the way there and have a huge hassle because my driver's license (and insurance card) were in the missing wallet. But all went well. And, indeed, the wallet must have fallen out of my pocketbook after I used the ATM and someone turned it in. So all was well and disaster averted.

There's actually another bit of good fortune in this since, had I not needed to buy gas, it could have been days before I'd have looked for my wallet. Instead, it was very easy to retrace my steps.

Now that I have proven to myself that the concept of karmic debt works (okay, I haven't proven a thing in any scientific sense but let's not nitpick here) I wonder how I can build up some credits that would protect me from random modem hangups in the middle of editing 100+ line files.