Ace: Where have all the good Samaritans gone?—Eve Hull
Eve: According to the Gospel of Luke, the good Samaritan took mercy on a man who was beaten and left for dead by robbers. Seems like his influence has reached far and wide because if you Google “good samaritans,” more than 500,000 results come up. Type it in at dictionary.com and it’ll tell you that a good Samaritan is someone who “gratuitously gives help or sympathy to those in distress.” But that’s just the Internet. To get a more accurate (and local!) idea, Ace took it to the streets.
Ace went out and got himself three cheap wallets, threw some old receipts, a $5 bill and some movie stubs into each one and left them in three different places: on the Corner, at the Downtown Mall and at Barracks Road. Hoping some sympathetic shopper would eventually return them to him, he also included in each a phone number with a fake name (a different name for each location, so he could identify which wallet had been picked up).
Lo and behold, about a week later, someone called for Lucy, claiming they’d found “her” wallet on the Downtown Mall. Was there somewhere they could send it? No, Ace said. You’ve got the wrong number.
Some time after that, Ace was Downtown imbibing with a few of his buddies. The next morning (read: 3pm) as he got dressed (read: showered and into his dressing gown), he noticed his watch was missing and realized he left it in the bathroom of the club the night before. Luckily, someone found it and left it for him, as Ace found out when he called. How neighborly, he thought.
No one ever actually called to return the wallets that were left at Barracks Road or on the Corner. Ace isn’t one to point fingers, but there are a lot of hungry students in those areas, so he can understand if someone out there bought a Big Mac instead of scoring a few points on the karma scale.
Actually, come to think of it, Ace scored a few points on that scale himself. Not only did he give away $10, but he let the wallet-returner keep the other $5 too! So, where have the good Samaritans gone? Look no further, because here he is, Ace Atkins himself.
