50th and Sixth

Dear Diary:

I lost my wallet in Midtown early one morning. At around 1 p.m. that day, I got a call from a man who said he had found it.

Although he didn’t speak English very well, he managed to tell me that he worked from 3 a.m. to noon delivering propane to coffee carts from Midtown to the financial district and that he hadn’t been able to call me until he got home to Queens. He apologized for opening my wallet to find my business card.

He told me he would leave the wallet at a coffee cart on 50th Street and Sixth Avenue, where I would be able pick it up the next day any time after 3 a.m. I asked him to put it in a bag, so that it wasn’t obvious it was a wallet.

Despite everything I said, he wouldn’t let me send him anything to thank him. I asked his name several times and he told me several times, but I couldn’t understand him. When I asked him to spell it, that didn’t work either. After we hung up, I received a simple text: just his first name.