You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The wedding ring.
A bad week gets better.
Nobody said life was easy. But nobody said it had to suck all the time either.
The mother sat on her couch and held back the tears. In her lap, her 18 month old child.
The precocious little girl waved and smiled and cooed.
You couldn’t tell it from this encounter, but the child has had a tough start to life.
She was born with a congenital heart defect that surgeons had to fix.
They fixed it.
Just in time for the child to get Leukemia.
Yikes.
Life isn’t fair.
The baby underwent 6 rounds of chemo.
Her mother says she is waiting on final test results, but she is cautiously optimistic.
18 months of non stop hell. Maybe, finally, hopefully it’s all over.
Finally a chance to relax, right?
Not so fast.
Real life has a way of kicking you in the teeth.
After a non stop series of trips to Vanderbilt Medical Center for one thing or another, this mother with the sick child finds herself back in life’s cross hairs.
She is at this wonderful place of healing, ironically for an illness of her own.
She is in the lobby talking to her doctor about a clinical study.
Her baby is with her. Her purse in the baby’s diaper bag attached to her stroller.
At some point she goes to get her purse and it is gone.
Sometime, somehow, while in the hospital lobby, someone reaches into her diaper bag and steals her purse.
She is not looking for a fraction of a second and in that moment someone steals her purse.
Unbelievable.
She’s a bartender and her purse contains hundreds in cash and credit cards.
More importantly, she will tell me it also contains her wedding ring.
Why was her wedding ring in her purse?
“I was going to have it resized and I was taking it to the jeweler,” she will say.
“That’s the hardest part. It represents my marriage.”
She chokes back the tears.
“it’s been such a tough year and now this.”
I thank her for her time. I tell her I will tell her story and try to find the bad guys who stole her purse.
The audacity!
If her purse was stolen from the hospital waiting room, then it was taken by a fellow patient, or someone related to a patient.
That person knows the pain of being in a hospital.
It’s a despicable person who could do such a thing.
My goal is to catch the bad guy.
I air the story. No bad guys caught.
Drats! I think to myself.
I figure that is the end of it. But what happened next was very unexpected.
My in box chimes.
There is an email chain from the sales department at the station and the media buyers for a major jewelry company.
The long and short of it: Managers for the diamond company saw my story and want to replace the mother’s wedding ring with a comparable wedding band.
My station loves the idea.
“Can you get the woman to go to the store and get her ring today?” my boss asks.
News has a heart, but only if it can be done at break neck, impossible speed.
I look around the table.
It’s 2pm on a Friday.
Do you all really believe that in 2 hours, I can get the momma to drop everything, tell her about this wonderful news, and make it to a jewelry store? Do you all think in 2 hours I can get a major diamond company to be on hand for that mother to show up and give her a FREE diamond? Are you all crazy?
Yes they are.
And guess what?
I do it.
2 and a half hours later, there I am, inside the jewelry store video taping the momma, her baby, and baby’s grandmother as they enter the store.
They are excited, but nervous.
The bartender-mom is not demonstrative so this attention is overwhelming.
She walks into the store and she is greeted by a tidal wave of Jewelry store love.
The mangers come up to her and grab her hand and welcome her.
They know her and her story because of my report.
They recite to her things I said in my news story.
I am amazed at the power of the broadcast medium.
The woman steps to the jewelry counter and the nice man before her begins sizing her ring.
He tells her that the company wants to pay it forward, that the community has been good to them and they want to be good to her.
Then he places the diamond in the setting and tears well in her eyes.
“This is so overwhelming,” she says. “I cannot say thank you enough.”
I look around the room. Everyone is smiling. Everyone feels good.
At this moment, I am glad to be a part of this.
“You finally get to tell a nice story,” the saleswoman will tell me before I leave the station.
I smile thinking about what I told her. “It’s like a vacation day.”
She laughed.
Now everyone can laugh and be reminded there are in deed good people in the world.
As I was saying in the interview. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
She suffered bad, and this is the other end of the spectrum.
As I leave the jewelry store, my heart is sparkling like the new diamond the woman is wearing on her ring finger.
Sometimes life has a way of making you realize that there are still good people in the world.
Life’s Crazy™