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A Tearjerker
6 March 2023
You have a few options when you find something on the street. You can invoke the finders-keepers rule and keep it. You can pocket it and put a lost-and-found notice on craigslist. You can leave it where you found it. Among others.
Tearjerker. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 23mm (46mm equivalent), f9, 1/400 second and ISO 200. Processed with Adobe Camera Raw.
Invoking the finders-keepers rule may work best for items like a lost penny whose owner can't reliably be identified. We prefer to leave pennies. We enjoy imagining someone else will consider it their lucky day.
We're not fond of the lost-and-found option. We suspect only a small percentage of people who lose things try to track them down via a lost-and-found notice. With the exception of venues like buses and stadiums and theaters where one would automatically check the lost-and-founds.
You have a few options when you find something on the street.
Leaving things where you find them is based on the theory that when the owner realizes they've lost it they will retrace their steps trying to locate the lost item. Which is something we have done more than once with success.
To make that a little less taxing on the aggrieved, the common practice is to put the object in plainer site.
That seems to be what happened to this book. Someone found it on the sidewalk, put it on top of the low wall and left it to be retrieved.
Except it rained.
And the book got very wet sitting there exposed to the weather. We didn't have the heart to see if it had been turned into pulp again.
We did check the title on the spine. Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman, a sci-fi novel in which the immortal humans of the future get nostalgic for our era of finite lives and travel back in time to experience it. Except what some of them experience is death.
Come to think of it, maybe it wasn't soggy from the rain at all. Maybe it was tears instead.