MONEY and ME and MY DOG

Have you ever held a gold bar in your hand?

Believe me; it is magical.

Gold has a drug-like quality and leaves you feeling that this is so beautiful you never want to let it go.

Now, if you are wondering why I would make such a statement, perhaps I should explain,

It all started when I returned from the beach after my daily jog along the shoreline.

I did not see the old, battered briefcase that the grandkids had left in the garage and almost tripped as my toe kicked it further along the garage floor. I regained my balance and remembered that my wife, Judy, had mentioned that the grandkids had found it in the bush adjacent to the car park for the creek's walking trail. They had brought it back to us in the hope that their grandmother would clean it up and then try to sell it in her antique shop.

It looked all weather-beaten and sad but was probably someone's pride and joy not so long ago.

I gathered it up and took it into the house. From the feel of it, there were still a few bits and pieces floating around inside.

‘Please tell me that you are not going to waste your time trying to clean up this beaten-up old thing and attempt to make it into a respectable accessory that some eccentric financial type might treasure.’ I said as I passed it to Judy.

‘You never know what is possible in this big wide world.’ she replied in a disinterested manner. ‘One man's trash is another man's treasure.’

‘ “Never know" are the operative words in that sentence, and treasure does not seem to be worth a mention. If it was stolen property, even the robbers thought that it was worthless.’ I said.

‘Don't be like that; come on over here and see if you can open it. I need to have a look at what's inside.’

It was one of those rectangular-shaped cases designed to hold a few manila folders and all the usual paraphernalia.

The combination locks worked on a setting of 000 on each side. I immediately felt an affinity with the bloke that had owned this briefcase.

‘Should we not be reporting this to the police,’ I asked as I popped the locks and lifted the lid.

The lid opened effortlessly, which suggested that it may not have been out in the weather all that long.

‘Let us just have a peek inside first,’ my wife said before she then added. ‘Well, this doesn't look like anything to be excited about.’

‘Perhaps I should call the local police station to let them know what we have found. If they think they can find the owner, it may save me a bit of tidying up work and keep the grandkids happy.’

The bits and pieces lying in the briefcase looked like they had been hastily swept off someone’s desktop.

There were paper clips, a stapler, two erasers, three ballpoint pens, two half-used post-it note packs of different sizes, a little black book, a stick of that whiteout stuff, and a mobile phone charger. Oh, and then there was one other thing, a black painted paperweight.

‘Here we go.’ I said as I picked up the book. ‘Perhaps whoever owns this lot might have left their phone number and address in this little black diary.’.

I started to thumb through the pages, and the last entry was in the last week of January. Well, that is if you can call it an entry. You see, the writing was like some wiggly but beautiful markings that at first glance reminded me of some different sheet music transcript.

But then the penny dropped. I realised that it was some form of Sanskrit writing but in what language and from what country?

While l was browsing through the diary, my wife emptied the briefcase's contents into a large plastic container.

When she picked up the black paperweight, she said, ‘I cannot imagine why anyone would carry such an unbelievably heavy object around.’

As she tossed it into the plastic container with the rest of the stuff, it made a solid thumping sound as it connected with the metal stapler.

I sat down at the kitchen table and leafed through the diary again. To me, it looked like a diary of reasonable quality. It was printed in English and was A5 page size.

It was a week a page layout that suggested that it belonged to an older man who may be semi-retired but still active, although not submerged in day-to-day commerce.

Since the last entry was the last Friday in January, the briefcase must have been lying around in the bush for only a few weeks.

Then I looked at the date and realized that this was a 2020 diary.

What is going on here?

No cunning burglar would have kept evidence of his crime hanging around for a year or so before dumping it in the bush. But the condition of the briefcase suggested that it could not have been lying around in the bush for more than a few weeks.

I went to look at the post-it notes that my wife had put in the plastic container and noticed that the black paperweight was glowing with a yellowy shine where the paint had been chipped off.

My eyes were drawn to the object, and when I picked it up, I was surprised at the weight of the thing. It was almost twice as heavy as I had expected some lead-painted bar to be. I scratched off more paint; more yellowy shiny metal was exposed.

I was astonished. This paperweight was a solid gold bar about 2 inches by 1 inch by 1/4 inch in size and must have weighed more than half a pound.

I turned to my wife, who had set about making a cup of tea, and said, ‘I think we have a serious problem.’

‘And just what problem would that be?’ she asked.

“The problem, my dear, is that we have to decide between keeping a find worth almost $20,000 Australian or shutting up and forgetting about trying to find the rightful owner, whoever that might be. ‘I said as I showed her the gold bar.

How could you live with yourself if you did not make some attempt to do the right thing? Surely I must be smart enough to find out who owned that diary. The diary and the gold bar must belong to the same person.

The loss of something precious is depressing.

The loss we felt when our dog disappeared was shattering.

My wife still had not gotten over the loss of our beautiful bulldog. We had advertised everywhere, but no one had found her wandering lost in the neighborhood. That dog was about as useless as they come, but we just loved her to bits, and she loved us back.

Once she fell into the swimming pool and sank like a stone. There she was on all fours looking up at us from the bottom of the pool with those beautiful brown eyes that seemed to say, ‘What do I do now?’

We fished her out and received our reward of a few licks on the face and the wiggle of her whole back body and that stumpy tail.

We each approached the problem with a different degree of intensity and logic.

$20,000 is a lot of money. Whoever lost this gold bar must be feeling so sorry for themselves.

Looking back, I suppose that you could say that trying to help someone was the driving force behind my wife's attempt to solve this problem.

As for me, I suppose you could say that if my mother had not insisted on me attending Sunday school at that St. John's church in Glebe Rd, then I might have been less interested in finding the rightful owner. I ask you, how can you dismiss the parable of the good Samaritan and so many similar tales.

We both agreed that we would do our best to return the gold bar to its owner.

I went to my office and fired up my computer while Judy phoned the local police station.

Like me, I am sure that you probably have a few regrets about things that you would have liked to achieve but did not because you were always worried about other pressing needs. I always felt inadequate about not speaking, writing, or reading any language other than English.

That memory got me thinking about the days of the late 60s and early 70s when Judy and I had spent some time in South Africa.

Most of the Zulu blokes on the construction site spoke a smattering of English and Afrikaans and their Zulu language.

The other memory from that time was of the English-only speaking South Africans stashing away gold Kruger Rands as a safety net for when they may have to start a life in another country.

Whoever owned this gold bar had to be a refugee!

My computer told me that 70% of Australian refugees were from countries that wrote in Sanskrit. The laptop also allowed me to compare examples of writing styles, which led me to conclude that the diary probably belonged to the head of a family from Myanmar.

One other thing that I should mention is that this diary had a folding pocket attached to the inside flap of the back cover. A handy and unique feature. Inside that pocket was a business card for Jimmy Smith, Concreter, No job too small-- phone number.

It made a lot more sense now to ring Jimmy Smith and ask him if he had done any work for a Myanmar refugee family. Much better than asking if he had lost a briefcase with a black paperweight that might have been a gold bar.

Jimmy had put a slab down at the back of a house for a refugee family wishing to build a work shed on the property. He was happy to give us the address.

We returned the gold bar, and the joy and the happiness that followed was far beyond my ability to put into words.

There was an issue that the family did not want to discuss, and we did not want to know the details. I have no idea if there is a parallel to the prodigal son's parable in the Buddhist texts, but it seemed that there might have been something along those lines going on with one of the daughters and her partner.

Our reward was witnessing the joy within that family and, of course, making friends with such charming people.

I have to say that the delight we felt in handing over that gold bar far exceeded any drug-like thrill of possessing such an object.

And for any of you that may be sarcastic and think that it is rubbish to believe that virtue has its own reward, let me add this little aside.

We were sitting in the kitchen one evening when there was a scratch at the back door.

There was Winnie, our lovely bulldog. She had a large leather collar with about 6 inches of chain attached. The last link in the chain was broken. She was prancing from one front foot to the other. Her whole body was shaking with delight as she wagged her little tail. What a smile she had on her face.

She was ready to hand out licks all around.

I think I owe Winnie the dog an apology.

That dog brings more joy with her than any amount of gold bars.

How lucky am I?

John W Griffiths

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