A couple of weeks ago we were in Bolzano, in the Italian Alps. Wandering around the city I was caught up in taking snapshots, including this one of a man engrossed with his laptop. The image is not one of my best but there is a reason for not having deleted it. It is to memorialize a moment: right after I took the shot I idly felt for my wallet. It was gone. Do you know that feeling of horror, disbelief when you lose your wallet? Well, then you know how I felt.
It seemed hopeless to try to find it. But a whole chunk of my life was in the wallet, and with visions of international hassles canceling credit cards and the like, we started to retrace out steps. After several minutes I saw across the Piazza a man approaching an empty bench that we had been sitting on earlier. The bench was a good 100 feet away. That it is was unoccupied was odd: this was late afternoon and the nearby bus stops were bustling with people waiting for buses home. The man reached out to the bench and grabbed what looked to be my wallet, opening it. I yelled at him and he turned to look at me. As I hobbled toward him with my crutch he turned toward me also walking quickly. He was what we would call in San Francisco “homeless”: shabby, torn clothes, barefoot, dirty, smelling a bit. But he had a lovely smile as he pushed my wallet into my hand.
I felt joy, and in that moment I reached to his face, touched it and thanked him. Thrust my hand into my pocket, I tried to give him several euros of change, which he initially resisted. I called him a “good man” and he shambled off, while the many people standing by shook their heads, smiled, or ignored us… After a few moments I realized that this good turn deserved more than a few coins and I hobbled quickly after him to give him a 20 Euro bill. I hugged him. Passers by looked horrified: we saw almost no homeless people in Italy and this part of town was pretty fancy, so i assume that the sight of a man with a crutch hugging a tramp was not pleasing.
He told me I was a good man.
His goodness was better than mine. He had ample time to have run off with my wallet or argued about it, or held to a “finder’s keeper’s” common law. His goodness filled our afternoon and made us love Bolzano even more.
