I bought a pint of frozen yogurt a few days back and I received 0.73 US cents in return. I had this wild hair idea of leaving it somewhere on the sidewalk. Then a thought occurred, why just .73 cents? Why not something a bit bigger? I had a crumpled up one dollar bill in my pocket, and knew that I could part with it.
I walked along the sidewalk looking for the right place. Finding this right place was a game of intuition; a waiting for that tug of gut string that says, "This is it!" The tug happened under an old street lamp and I let the dollar go. It settled in some leaves that had wrapped themselves around the lamp's base. I stood for a minute and stared at it feeling a strange sense of excitement. Who would find it? Who would get that small rush of pleasure that happens when finding a dollar?
The next morning the dollar was gone.
Yesterday, in the early morning, I repeated the task along a different street. A few blocks after dropping the money a woman passed me walking in the opposite direction. I turned and watched her head up the sidewalk in the way I had just come. One block. Two blocks. Three blocks. Eventually, I could barely make out her shape, and could see nothing but her blue coat bobbing away from me. Then the spot of blue stopped, leaned over, and one arm reached toward the ground.
I'm not sure if the dollar made her day, but I know that it made mine.
