In last week’s column, I wrote about traveling to Warsaw for the international Literacy for Democracy conference. What I failed to mention was that I left my beloved black leather jacket behind.

Five minutes into my Uber ride to the Warsaw airport, I realized it was missing. I quickly emailed the conference organizers and asked if they could retrieve it, offering, of course, to reimburse them for their troubles.

“That’s going to cost more than the jacket,” my colleague offered. Which was definitely true because the jacket was free at a clothing swap.

Ten days after I returned from Poland, so did my jacket. Wrapped neatly in a box with two bookmarks and a handwritten note: “Greetings from Poland. Best, Ola.”

I posted a photo on Facebook, eager to share this lovely footnote to an already wonderful trip. And then something even better happened: My comments started to fill with similar stories.

“Recently I left a vest that I really liked in a Kettle Moraine bar and grill,” Steven Larson wrote. “It had sentimental value. Left them a $20 bill in their mailbox and they sent it to my house!”

“My husband left his phone in a taxi in NYC while we were on our way to a rehearsal dinner,” Beth Cooper-Zobott wrote. “We called the phone and asked the driver to drop it off at the hotel and said we’d leave a reward for him at the bell stand. We asked the hotel front desk to charge $50 to our room and leave it for the driver in an envelope. When we got back after dinner the bellman gave us the phone and the envelope with the money still inside.”

“I was in London and I lost my purse and the bus driver told me we would never see it again,” Kelly Kuningas wrote. “A couple weeks later, I received my purse, less the cost to ship it to me to Chicago from what was in my wallet.”

My friend Audrone Jaraite offered this:

“If humanity could somehow be measured, the effort people make to return lost things to their owners would be one of the truest measurements.”

Isn’t that so true? I asked for more stories. More stories poured in.

“Ran into people who bought my parents’ house,” Susan Berger wrote. “When they renovated their kitchen they found my dad’s dog tags from WWII. I now have them and wear them.”

“I dropped my phone in the Loop last week and a kind guy working at the Daley Center found it in the street and answered my call mid-morning saying that he was waiting for the phone to ring,” Kathleen Heneghan wrote. “I picked it up before lunch and was soooo grateful! Thanks to John who works on the 7th floor at the Daley Center!”

“When the kids were younger, we stayed overnight in Sikeston, Missouri, on our way to visit some family,” Justin Kmitch wrote. “A few hours into the second leg of our trip, it was discovered that all of their ‘nighttime friends’ got left behind. A frantic call to the hotel confirmed our worst fear. Nap and bedtimes on this vacation were going to suck until we picked Pooh Bear, Baby and Marshall from ‘Paw Patrol’ up on our way back home. The hotel manager, however, graciously offered to ship them to my aunt’s house, where we were staying. The next morning, a box arrived. (Yes. She overnighted them.) And all three were wrapped in a small towel, as if they were in bed and the towel was the comforter. I’ve never written a thank you note faster.”

This particular kindness has been researched, by the way. Dave Nussbaum, a friend and adjunct professor at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, caught wind of my plea and sent me a 2019 Science article looking at civic honesty in 355 cities spanning 40 countries.

“In these experiments, we turned in more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money at public and private institutions and measured whether recipients contacted the owners to return the wallets,” the authors write. “In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Additional data suggest that our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, both of which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.”

Fascinating.

“Not exactly what you asked for,” Susan Leavitt Poklop wrote, “but I left behind the overpriced, but very much wanted, Kenny Chesney T-shirt in the bathroom following the Sphere concert. Husband, without saying a word, had a new one delivered. It might now be one of my highest net expensive pieces of clothing.”

Not exactly what I asked for, but exactly what I needed to hear.

“When my mother was sick with early onset Alzheimer's, I got her a stuffy dog to hold on her lap,” Mary Webber O'Malley wrote. “It was Pal from the ‘Arthur’ show, and it calmed my mother to pet it. When my mother died, our daughter adopted Pal and it became her comfort stuffy. She brought it on her honeymoon to Ireland, but left it behind at an Airbnb. The owners very kindly sent it back to her with a lovely note talking about Pal's extended stay on the Emerald Isle.”

“In the fall of 2019 my husband and I took a weekend trip to Galena and visited Blaum Bros. Distilling Co.,” Janet Hosey wrote. “I was wearing his U.S. Merchant Marine Academy ring, class of ’94. I took it off while I was washing my hands in the bathroom and forgot to put it back on. About an hour after we left, I realized I wasn’t wearing it. We went back to Blaum Bros., but it was gone and no one had turned it in. I felt awful and thought it was gone forever.”

Until owner Matt Blaum called in January 2020.

“He said the ring had been in their safe all this time, and someone noticed my husband’s name engraved inside the band,” Hosey wrote. “They looked us up in their computer and saw we had been there for a tour. They mailed the ring back to us along with a bunch of cool Blaum Bros. swag.”

I have so many more of these stories, and no more room to share them. But when cruelty starts to feel like the loudest thing we’re doing — which it often does these days — I’m returning to these stories to remind me that at our core, we want to help each other out. We really do.

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