My husband loses things. Keys, glasses, CD players. (He’s the last person in America to use a portable CD player, but that’s another story.) Last week he lost his cell phone.

He thought it had fallen out of his pocket in Baltimore. Or in Philly. It was somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region. The phone was history.

Or so we thought until I got a call this past weekend. “Do you know someone missing a phone?” asked a woman I didn’t know. Indeed I did. But she wasn’t about to hand over the Samsung to just anyone.

“Is this Hope?” she demanded, not just slightly suspicious. She had checked the phone’s outgoing-call log to see whom the owner had dialed most often. He usually called me.

Finally persuaded I was legit, she took my office number and said she’d call Monday afternoon when she got off work. Just after noon the phone rang. The woman, who gave her name as Lisa, said she’d meet me outside the Enoch Pratt main library.

As I crossed Cathedral Street, a woman on a bench out front waved to me. Lisa and I had never met but we recognized each other. She handed me the phone, which she said she’d found lying in the gutter on North Charles Street on Friday.

“It was about to get run over,” she said. I thanked her for her kindness, which she waved off.

As I turned to head back to work, she called after me: “I charged it for him.”

Powered by Bookmarkify™