The thing about urban legends is sometimes they're true.
This is the kind of story, a sparkling moment of serendipity, that can only happen in New York. And the fact that New York is where it happened makes it all the more unbelievable.
My wife and I recently flew to New York, where my mother was meeting us for a weekend on the town. We arrived a couple of hours before she did, and so we grabbed a taxi at JFK Airport and headed straight to Grimaldi's Pizzeria in Brooklyn, just at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
A side note: We hit a ton of traffic along the way (and the cabbie definitely took us the long way), and as a result we ran up a $75 fare, including tip. The trip from Queens to Brooklyn actually cost more than the flight from Richmond to New York.
At Grimaldi's, we met some friends from Richmond who had taken a separate flight and had a fabulous meal. But when we left, my wife, Mary Anne, realized she had left her tote bag in the cab.
Inside the bag were a pair of boots, an umbrella and a few other similar items, but most important was her personal organizer. In the organizer were her address book, her calendar and all of her vital lists and notes. She calls it her Book of Life, because it contains all of the information she needs, information she has nowhere else.
It tells the story of her life for the past 20 years.
Naturally, she was distraught. We asked the cab driver who was taking us from the pizza parlor to our hotel in Manhattan what she could do to retrieve it. He asked if we knew the cabbie's number, but we did not. He had given us a receipt but took it back from me, presumably to throw it away.
Without his number, there would be no way of knowing which garage he worked out of. Without his number, we wouldn't know where to start.
We slogged through more traffic in Manhattan, while Mary Anne fretted. By coincidence, we arrived at the hotel while my mother, who had flown in from Cincinnati, was getting out of her taxi. She had been delayed in front of the hotel for several minutes, she said, because the driver could not get her credit card to swipe through the machine.
Mary Anne and I dashed into the hotel to ask the concierge for help in tracking down her tote bag. But after a minute, I went back outside.
My mother's cab driver looked . . . familiar.
By then, he had managed to get the credit-card reader to work and had unloaded my mother's luggage. He was about to get back into the taxi and drive away, when I asked him to open the hatchback again. There was one more bag I needed to get, I said.
As he opened the trunk, my mother explained that the other bag in there wasn't hers, that she had found it in the cab and it belonged to his previous fare. I ignored her and removed the tote bag.
"That's not mine," my mother said again, a little frantically.
"No! No! No!" added the cab driver.
But I just smiled.
Seconds later, Mary Anne emerged from the hotel. A little shocked, but to the surprise and joy of all, she was reunited with her bag and her Book of Life.
Only in New York.
Contact Daniel Neman at (804) 649-6408 dneman@timesdispatch.com.
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