Lost and Found Glove in Manhattan - Good Deeds Story #2

It is unbelievable how fast time goes by. It is now March, 2008 and it has been over a year since I started the Honesty Blog. Many thanks to everyone that shared their stories about honesty and good deeds, voted for their favorite stories and shared their comments. So even though it is a few months into the year, I thought it was about time for me to post my first personal story for 2008.

Last month, I was in New York City for some meetings. We decided to find a brunch place a friend of mine had highly recommended. So we took a taxi towards Midtown and pretty soon found ourselves passing the street of the restaurant. We didn’t know exactly where it was, nor did our taxi driver. With so many thousands of restaurants, I can imagine it’s quite challenging for taxi drivers to keep up with all the restaurants. So we told him he could just drop us off and we would find our way since it was a one-way street.

While we were walking, I reached into my pocket for my gloves just to find one of them missing. I had dropped the glove inside the taxi! Thoughts rushed through my head as I also felt the bitter cold wind on my hands. They were not new gloves, but they did serve the purpose, and I really didn’t want to have to look for a new pair. All of a sudden, we heard a man yelling from across the street. It was our taxi driver! He had stopped his car in the street and walked back to tell us we were walking in the wrong direction. I was totally surprised and so impressed that our taxi driver cared enough to come back and point us in the right direction. As you can imagine, I ran across the street to thank him and to also let him know my glove was somewhere on the back seat. Thanks to the kindness of the cab driver, I was not only able to get my glove back, but I also made it for one of the best brunches I’ve had in a long time.

Later in the day, as I thought about the lost glove incident and it reminded me of the website project a Carnegie Mellon University art student, Jennifer Gooch, started called One Cold Hand?. The purpose of the site was to create a place where people from all over the world could report and find lost gloves. The founder describes the site as:

“onecoldhand.com is a project that connects the Pittsburgh community through one unfortunate event - the loss of a glove. The website creates a method for dealing with the conundrum of finding these lost articles. Do you leave it and hope the owner comes back to find it? Do you pick it up? Throw it away? With onecoldhand.com, the abandoned object now becomes a symbol of benevolence and hope.”
—–Jennifer Gooch

I especially like her last sentence “With onecoldhand.com, the abandoned object now becomes a symbol of benevolence and hope.” Many people might have never associated the loss of a glove with benevolence and hope, but I can tell you that had I not found my glove and later came across it on her site, I would have been very happy. It also would have made me feel encouraged to know someone took the time out of their busy schedule to do something for a complete stranger and I would want to do the same for someone else.

Add comment March 11th, 2008