A couple of weeks has passed since my last column, in which I told the story of a woman who found $20 paper clipped to a mysterious note in her mailbox.
Since that time, there have been some new developments. Namely, the mystery has been solved. Though it was not through expert sleuthing on my part. Rather, it came down to a series of simple coincidences that are enough to make me pause for a moment to wonder how much of life is really left to chance.
I know who was behind the mystery of the $20 bill, although we have not met in person. (At least, not to my knowledge, but I am learning that degrees of separation in Guelph are much fewer than six.)
The gifter called the office last Thursday. The woman, who has asked to remain anonymous, was upset when she read in my column that some people had deemed her gift to be “a little creepy.”
Said she, “Never in a million years would I have expected someone to have that reaction.” She left the money with only the best of intentions.
It was something she did after reading Stephen Levine’s A Year To Live. The book outlines practices and mediations to be done in the mindset of a person with only one year left to live. She picked it up just over a year ago, after a friend died.
Becoming the Cash Fairy (my words, not hers) was one of her bucket-list items. It was inspired years ago, when she found $100 in her own mailbox. “Just the surprise and the gratitude – it was wonderful, and I had always wanted to do that for somebody else,” she said.
Her note, which read “May you be happy/Enjoy! Enjoy!,” was her way of telling the recipients (yes, there were more than one) that the money was a gift.
The woman about whom I had written was not the only one to receive such a gift – a fact that I already knew, but had yet to share with the Trib-reading public.
The day after my column ran, Trib editor Chris Clark heard from a neighbour who had received the same gift. In this case, as in the case of my friend, the recipient was someone who we knew could use the pick-me-up. We  could see no other connection between the two, but it seemed the gifter must have chosen them on purpose. This is not the case.
The woman who committed this random act of kindness deposited $200 in $20 increments in mailboxes around town. She knew nothing of the people who lived in the homes.
“I will never know what happens to the money, whether it was spent on wonderful things or maybe on an addiction,” she said. For all she knew, the cash would get mixed in with the papers in the mailbox and would end up in the recycling.
It didn’t occur to her that one of recipient (let alone two) would be acquainted with local newspaper staff.
If the first coincidence was that someone in need found the money, the second coincidence was that person knowing me. The third coincidence: the Cash Fairy happened  to read about herself in my column – something she wouldn’t always read, as a rule.
She read the story and hoped that some of the other recipients would come forward to save her from breaking her anonymity. When this didn’t happen, she felt compelled to call in and explain.
Of course, I couldn’t resist telling my friend almost immediately, though I didn’t give up the gifter’s name.
The reaction: an urgent desire to thank the gifter for her good deed. She asked me if I could pass along a letter for her.
My answer was no. I have already meddled too much in this pleasantly serendipitous story.
My message to my friend, in the words of the anonymous gift giver: “Sometimes good things just happen in the world.”