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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;masterswimmer, post: 3515873, member: 102022&quot;]Great rediscovery! Congrats. </p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s my story. The date is June, 2000. My son&#039;s 13th birthday. It also corresponds to his Bar Mitzvah. We threw him a nice but modest soiree. One of the gifts he received was from my uncle, his great uncle. The gift was enclosed in a card within an envelope, cash. My uncle gave the card to my son right in front of me. My son graciously thanked him and in turn handed the envelope directly to me. </p><p><br /></p><p>Fast forward 4-5 hours. We&#039;re home and my son is opening his gifts. We&#039;re recording all the gifts he received so he can personalize each thank you card he&#039;s planning to send out. </p><p><br /></p><p>We finished opening all the gifts and the only gift missing was the gift from my uncle. Distraught, we searched all the pockets of my suit, my wife&#039;s purse, the car, the house and even called the reception venue to ask if anyone might have turned in a lost &quot;greeting card&#039;. All to no avail. </p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s the hard part. I had to call my uncle to ask a couple of questions. First, did I/we inadvertently give the envelope back to him among all the hoopla and partying? His response was &#039;no&#039;. Second, crossing my fingers I asked him if he gave the gift in the form of a check? His response was &#039;no, it was five $100 bills&#039;.</p><p><br /></p><p>I proceeded to explain the conundrum we were facing and how incredibly irresponsible I was misplacing his generous gift. He was not upset. He immediately offered to send another gift duplicating the first one. I told him that was incredibly generous and also explicitly explained that was not going to happen. He was a bit perturbed but acquiesced when he saw that I was unrelenting in my stance. My uncle has always been exceedingly benevolent with his gift giving, so this whole exchange was not a pleasant one. </p><p><br /></p><p>Fast forward 14 years to 2014. My son is living in Korea. My daughter has graduated from grad school and moved on. We&#039;re empty nesters. We decide to do some cleaning, consolidating and purging. One of the purges is the stack of papers two feet high next to my wife&#039;s dresser. Included in the &#039;pile o&#039; file&#039; are my son&#039;s Bar Mitzvah cards. Why we saved them is still an unknown. In our parting ways with the cards we reminisced one more time about the great time we had. The topic of my uncle&#039;s missing gift had become taboo. Unspoken between us we never brought that subject up again. It was a sore spot from an otherwise proud and joyful day. </p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, we begin going through each card. We get to one card in particular, open it, and five crisp new $100 bills fall into my wife&#039;s lap. Jaws agape, eyes bulging wide, speechless for just a moment, my wife and I simultaneously throw both arms into the air as if we scored a touchdown. Obviously no words needed to be spoken about what we just found. My uncle&#039;s gift somehow, someway eluded us 14 years earlier only to find its way to us once again. </p><p><br /></p><p>Our first call went to my uncle. To say he was elated would be a gross understatement of his emotion. He was thrilled, as were we. </p><p><br /></p><p>The second call was a Skype call to Korea. We told our son what we found and he was also thrilled. We immediately sent the $500 to pay down one of his student loans. </p><p><br /></p><p>To this day we have no idea whatsoever how that gift was misplaced and ultimately found its way into the stack of emptied cards..... and saved![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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