Yesterday, as I was walking through the parking lot toward the grocery store, a woman, who was loading groceries into her car, called out to me.
"Ma'am! Ma'am! Are you going shopping?"
I thought that was pretty obvious, but I stopped and said yes.
"I have a gift card that expires today. I can't use it. Do you want it? It has $50 on it."
She seemed perfectly normal, so I accepted it from her with gratitude. Who wouldn't?
Once I was in the store, however, I stopped to check the card balance based on the ancient Arab proverb, "Trust in God, but tie up your camel." I was not about to plop an extra $50 worth of groceries into my cart merely on the say-so of a stranger from the parking lot, however kind and sincere she appeared to be. I'm glad I did because the actual balance on the card was only $8.98. That was still almost $9 worth of free groceries! I got what I needed, emptied the gift card, and paid the difference.
No, I don't know the answers to any of the questions you have about the woman in the parking lot. I wish I did. It's not every day that strangers hand me free money, so I wasn't prepared with interrogation points. Maybe she handed me the wrong card. Maybe she forgot that she had already used most of the $50 on the one card she had. I have no idea. I wasn't even disappointed that the balance was only $9 because that was $9 of cash I didn't have before. I was just pleasantly surprised that someone handed me a gift card out of what seemed to be an abundance of generosity. I usually have only pleasant interactions with strangers, and this was not an exception.
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