$300 at 7:30 AM

So this thing happened, on my way to work. And it involved $300. Well, maybe.

Let me explain.

I was walking down the street, and approaching someone who appeared a little… unsteady. And a little disheveled. Their sweat pants were a little loose and baggy, but clinging on. They weren’t homeless, but if you told me this person had slept rough the night before, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

About a block away, I see a piece of paper flutter out of his hands. As I’m walking, I see him take something out of his pocket, and it too flutters to the ground. At this point, I feel like he’s just a litterbug… and throwing things away.

About a half a block away, I see him hold a piece of paper in his hand before flicking it into the air with his finger. The papers all look like receipts to me, at a distance.

As I’m nearing him, he looks over his shoulder at me. I wonder what’s going to happen when I get closer – will I have to walk by him? Is it going to get weird? I’m incredibly apprehensive.

The guy takes a right, and walks into a nearby park (behind a small fence). I feel a sense of relief that I’m not needing to walk near him or have any potential for interaction or any kind of altercation.

As I walk by, I look down and I see what looks like a crisp $100 bill, folded in half. Three of them, in fact.

At a glance, I’m unable to tell if they’re real or fake. They weren’t the older bills, the green color ones. These looked more modern, crisp sleek lines.

I’ll confess: I haven’t held or looked at a $100 bill in quite some time. So I really don’t have any idea what a “real” hondo looks like anymore.

What I did: I just kept on walking. I ignored everything on the ground, I ignored the weird man in the park. I just kept on walking to my Metra stop.

As I passed, I realized that there were several possible paths, several choices I could have made (instead of the one I chose).

I could have stopped to inspect the bills. And to try to determine if they were real or fake.

If they were real, I could have gathered the bills and pocketed them. I would have been $300 richer, for just a few seconds of work.

Alternatively, if I found them to be real… I could have tried to return them to their rightful owner. The guy who dropped them, and then walked into the park. This option, on reflection, was perhaps the more correct, more moral thing to do. Someone who was impaired lost money in front of me; I should have attempted to return their money to them. I should have tried to make things right.

But instead, I walked away from all of it… too wary, too sketched out by the person who had dropped the “money” in the first place.

Even now, many hours later, I’m not sure how I feel about my actions. I walked away (potentially) from $300. I don’t think I would have actually pocketed the money, so this option is out.

But I didn’t try to get this man’s money back to him. For fear of conversation/confrontation. For fear of his erratic behavior.

I don’t know if I made a good, pragmatic decision. Or if the city has beaten me down to where my moral code has taken a back seat to my sense of self-preservation. There’s a version of me that I see in my mind, many years younger, dressed in an old Boy Scout uniform with a few Troop 18 pins. And that younger me has a look of disappointment on his face.

It was a surprisingly complex philosophical scenario that I encountered, at 7:30 in the morning as I was walking to the train. If you had encountered this situation, I’m wondering what you would have done.

I’m thinking about what I did. I feel pretty sure I did a right thing. But I’m not sure if I did the right thing.

[photo via Giorgio Trovato]

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