Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Bank or cracker box?

A few days ago a story hit the wires about someone who found $10000 in a box of crackers. It turned out that an elderly woman had put the money there, and then in a mix up somehow the crackers had been returned to the store and put back on the shelves. The line that struck me was this:
The Lake Forest woman, whose identity was not released, had lost faith in her bank and decided the box would be a safer place for the money.
Everyone knows that a box of crackers is a much safer place to keep money than in a bank, right?

The story reminds me of another incident, but one that did not have a happy ending. In the little town that I called home half a century ago, there was an poor old lady noted for her holiness. After we moved away, she became ill and had to go to the hospital. Her fellow parishioners thought they could do a good deed by cleaning out her tiny house and buying her a new bed, which they did. When she came home, she got very agitated when she saw what they had done. It took a while for the do-gooders to come to the conclusion that the little old lady had put her life savings in the old mattress which they had burned.

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