so Found a cool two hundred and fifty bucks on Sunday afternoon, in the parking lot at Canal Walk, our megamall at Century City in Cape Town. It wasn't cold hard cash. It was in fact a voucher, for my current favourite store in the whole world; to whit, Exclusive Books. They have everything you can think of - fiction non-fiction science fiction crime fiction photography art architecture painting sculpting advertising cult occult magazines comics encyclopaedias science everything. Ev.Ery.Thing. They are hella expensive, since everything is imported there, and our government has hefty import tarriffs and duties on books particularly. The branch there at Canal Walk is by far not the best branch of theirs in Cape Town - that honour lies with the branch at the Waterfront - but it will certainly do in a pinch. And there I was, clutching a purple and blue envelope in my grubby little mitt, as my mom always said, with their arty logo emblazoned without, and a R200 and a R50 voucher stashed within, all alone in the carpark with nobody nearby saying "Sorry... that's mine. Where did you find it??" Dilemma - since I completely failed to win the Lottery Saturday night - and it was worth a cool twenty three-odd million bucks in .za money, or about 3 and half million in US money, or 2 million in GBP etc etc, should I take this R250 and put it with some other moeny I have been putting aside for a rainy day and go and buy myself a superb book like Time's Photographs of the Century, or 1001 Amazing Album Covers or something suchlike? Or should I do the right thing and see if, somehow, they can use the serial number validating each little voucher and perhaps trace the customer who'd lost them, hoping of course that said customer had paid via credit card or cheque. Or should I keep it, a gift from G_d on a murky Sunday afternoon, a Sunday which for all intents and purposes had not been that good a day, and, unbeknown to me, would in fact continue to be quite sucky well into Monday? It wasn't mine, but Finders Keepers, right? Inside, immediately, I knew that I couldn't keep it. It was necessary for karma, really; the results of Day 16 half a world away (yes, unwritten-about at this time excpet as a mild allusion) involving a subway renovation meaning I had to change trains and in doing so lost my pride and joy, my camera, by leaving on the seat while on The Tour. A convoluted chain of events, however, starting some 3 time zones away and a stripsearch earlier, though, meant that somebody found it. And called the number written on the American Airlines tag on it, and took time out of his day to come to find me to return it. There was no way I could keep the voucher in the murky afternoon 7 months later in another hemisphere and keep a clean conscience. I went to Exclusive and explained my story. The guy there said there was no way to trace the owner - it had been a cash transaction. He offered the vouchers back to me. I opted to leave them there, hoping that perhaps the person may realise they'd lost them and phone. He said come see us later - if they're still here, you take them. I didn't go back. The guy, Adam, who found my camera on the Blue line train at Jay Street in Brooklyn and phoned me repeatedly trying to let me know he had it, was married. To a South African woman, from Cape Town. I'm kinda hoping maybe it's a relative of hers who lost the voucher and that she did phone and that she got them back. Yeah, my camera and all its things were worth a lot more, a lot more; but I don't think that's what karma is about. -d-