[A note from the author: I haven’t shared any of my writing here since 2017 – how time gets away from us! So today I have chosen a piece that I shared late in 2021 with my friend and former English teacher, Don Davis. He died in early 2022. But before he did, he read many of my journal entries and gave me his feedback on my “gems.” This is one he identified as such. And so, in honor of his memory and his influence in my life, I offer it here. ~Donna]

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July 15, 2019
It was not a smooth travel day yesterday. My flight was delayed on the taxi-way out of DIA and it was delayed upon landing at Heathrow with no available gate at which to park. The Heathrow Express was not running (and I had prepaid the fare!) and I was forced to take the long (but cheap) Picadilly Line tube route into Central London. At the hotel, my room keys failed to work even after 3 attempts. When I finally got things settled, I realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat since the weird white bread cheese and sun-dried tomato toasty on the plane (the best part about it was the three cups of coffee with which I washed it down).

So I headed out for my favorite pub, in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London – Passyunk Avenue – and devoured (in a savoring kind of way) an enormous and enormously tasty Italian hoagie, an Illinois wheat beer on tap, and a shot of Naked Grouse whiskey. Then I started the two-mile walk home. As I was strolling along Oxford Street, I came to a street kiosk that sold scoops of Italian ice cream. And I determined I had just enough room remaining for strawberry ice cream to trickle down and ooze into the remaining gaps in my now almost full belly.

I ordered from the young man tending the kiosk and just as he handed me the cone, I held out a £10 note to pay for the £2.50 ice cream. At that very moment, a gust of breeze blew the money away and it flew into the air swirling about somewhere, I thought, behind me. I whirled around and looked everywhere, but couldn’t find the note. I was ready to call it a loss and pulled out another £10 bill.

But both the young man and his father circled out of the kiosk (leaving it otherwise unattended) and were determined to find that money! The young man even got on his hand and knees to see if it went under the kiosk. And eventually he actually found my money – plastered flat against the wall of the kiosk with the lower edge caught in a little crease. They were both triumphant and as the young man stepped back into the kiosk to make my change, he simply shook his head and said: “such an expensive cone!”

I thanked the two of them profusely and walked on, thoroughly enjoying my ice cream and that oozing thing. But as I did, I couldn’t help feeling that l had just been very well-cared for – like I had done church in the middle of crowded London, right there in July on Oxford Street.