LIHU‘E — An embarrassing and funny story about a Lihu‘e man who accidentally placed his wallet in a vehicle he thought was his but wasn’t had a happy ending. And in a really-small-island way, Earl Morton got an early Christmas
LIHU‘E — An embarrassing and funny story about a Lihu‘e man who accidentally placed his wallet in a vehicle he thought was his but wasn’t had a happy ending.
And in a really-small-island way, Earl Morton got an early Christmas present in the return of the wallet.
After the front-page story ran in the Monday issue of The Garden Island, Morton got a call Monday morning from Bonnie Lake, who found Morton’s wallet in her Ford Escape sport-utility vehicle center console, right where Morton left it.
“I was flabbergasted” to get Lake’s call, Morton said Monday morning.
Here’s where the island gets much smaller.
When he went to Lake’s Lihu‘e home to retrieve his wallet, he found out his mother-in-law knows Lake very well, and his wife Marlene had Lake as a school teacher.
Morton’s adventure started last week after he left a physical-therapy clinic in the Lihu‘e Civic Center annex along Kuhio Highway, when he put his wallet into the center console of a vehicle that looked a lot like his.
It wasn’t.
After his appointment, Morton and his wife grabbed some quick lunch, after she hit their vehicle’s auto-unlock button so he could leave his wallet and therapy schedule in their vehicle.
Their vehicle unlocked, but Earl Morton dropped the paperwork and wallet into Lake’s vehicle.
Lake returned the paperwork to the clinic, and clinic staff called Earl Morton to let him know someone had returned the paperwork.
Then Morton realized he had placed his wallet in someone else’s vehicle.
Over what must have been a long weekend at the Morton home, the Monday-morning phone call was a gift, Morton said.
Among the items in the wallet are Morton’s commercial driver’s license, an expensive endorsement to replace, he said last week.
