Believing like winning a lottery — it can happen

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2009 (6304 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I was golfing last week at the Manitoba Children’s Museum charity event when my cellphone rang.

The number wasn’t familiar but I answered anyway. Just in case it was something important.

It was.

At least it was to the desperate woman on the other end of the phone. Lorraine Maciboric had lost her diamond and gold bracelet.

But it wasn’t just any bit of bling.

It had meaning.

“ö “ö “ö

The bracelet was a 25th wedding anniversary gift that Lorraine’s husband, Rick Litinsky, presented to her on a Caribbean cruise last winter. Although, Lorraine didn’t mention that right way. First she segued into her “ask” with a little soft sell.

“I know you’re a romantic.”

Normally, I might have taken the time to dispute that, but I was on a golf course, remember? Quickly she got to the point. She wanted me to put her lost bracelet announcement in my column.

By that time, my golf pals were waiting eagerly to see if I could slice yet another ball into yet more water.

I said I’d get back to her.

Meanwhile, Lorraine tried others. She emailed CBC anchor Janet Stewart and BOB-FM’s Tom Milroy, of Beau and Tom fame. Then she started putting up posters along Pembina Highway.

The next day I called Lorraine back and gently told her I don’t write a lost-and-found column.

But I knew where she could find one. The Free Press runs free “lost” announcements in the classified section.

Try that, I suggested.

What I didn’t tell her, what I was really thinking, is I’ve got a better chance of scoring a hole-in-one on a par-5 than she had of recovering her lost bracelet.

But that wouldn’t have fazed her.

The lost notice, offering an unspecified reward, began appeared Thursday through Saturday.

On Sunday, someone called but Lorraine was busy and didn’t pick it up until Monday.

It was a man who said his name was Scott. He told Lorraine he had found a diamond and gold bracelet in a parking lot on Pembina Highway. They agreed to meet that afternoon.

The man waiting in front of a Staples Business Depot, near where the bracelet was found, appeared to be in his late 30s. And he had a Free Press tucked under his arm. The bracelet was wrapped in Kleenex, as if he had anticipated Lorraine might need one.

“I started to cry,” Lorraine recalled.

Scott told her she didn’t have to give him a reward, but he also remarked he worked two jobs. Lorraine had brought $300 with her.

“If you could only have seen his beaming face when I put the money in his hand.”

Then Lorraine gave Scott a hug.

“I’m so happy,” she told me the next day. “I have so much gratitude for that man I could fly.”

But her joy was rooted in the sentimental value, not the gold and precious stones.

“It only meant something to me in my heart, because of what he said when he gave it to me.”

Which was?

“I’m not telling you,” Lorraine laughed. “It was very romantic.”

But the bracelet represented more than romance, or even sentiment.

It symbolized marital survival.

Twenty-five years of “surviving the good, the bad and the ugly,” as Lorraine phrased it.

Especially when so many don’t.

Or, as she said: “It’s good to know that your partner still means the world to you, because we all know people who don’t think that way.”

“ö “ö “ö

What impresses me most about this seemingly simple story is the way this “pit bull in heels,” as a friend calls Lorraine, was so driven.

Oddly, I think what drove Lorraine to find the bracelet that had so much symbolic meaning to her is also what compels so many people to buy lottery tickets every week.

No, not hope, because hope isn’t enough.

It’s believing.

Believing that someone had it and would return it. Believing that you have a chance at those millions.

The difference, of course, is the value Lorraine attaches to that bracelet — what it represents in her life — is worth more than any lottery jackpot.

Believe it, or not.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca