Lost wallet leads to adventure

My brother has always been like the proverbial absent-minded professor.

As a doctor, Shane can, and has, saved lives — but it’s finding his keys to drive to the hospital that gives him trouble. Even in college, friends had extra keys to Shane’s car. He’s lost jackets, left his cellphone in New York taxis — twice — and gotten them back.

Last weekend, he took his absentmindedness to new heights.

After he and his wife came to my parents’ house to pick me up for coffee, he was looking for his wallet that he thought he’d left there the night before. Sister-in-Law said she’d seen it on a table at their home that morning. They arrived in separate vehicles because she had an event to attend later.

As we started backing out of the driveway in her car, my brother stopped us. There, on the back of his Avalanche, was his iPad mini precariously perched on top of the covered truck bed. He remembered he’d placed it and his wallet there when he stopped to help his very pregnant wife carry some things from her car into their house.

Somehow, the iPad made the trip down his steep driveway, around a curvy road and down the four-lane bypass to our parents’ house.

The wallet, however, was gone.

We drove back to their house, expecting to see it lying in their driveway. It wasn’t there. My brother and I got out and walked the road while Sister-in-Law drove, a few yards ahead of us, like a pace car in a race.

We scanned the four-lane, even pulling over at one point when we saw something black that looked like a wallet. Come to find out, a whole lot of trash is black.

A few hours later, my brother got a call from the medical answering service. A man had found his wallet.

Shane called the guy, and they decided to meet at a nearby Burger King. He invited me to go with him.

We walked in and started scanning the place for the Good Samaritan. We immediately saw two men in a booth. The older man had salt-and-pepper hair that fell past his shoulders, along with a matching full beard. He could have been Uncle Si’s long-lost brother — or a hippie straight from Woodstock.

The second man was his mini me.

My brother looked at them, glanced around and looked at them again. “Did you find a wallet?” he asked.

The older man nodded and smiled. “You didn’t expect this, did ya?” he said.

To be honest, I would have picked him last out of everyone in the restaurant, maybe the city.

We were introduced to “the famous Sevener brothers,” as the older man, Terry, described himself and his brother, who was developmentally delayed.

I felt the column gods smile on me. I took notes as they talked.

My brother, with his new short beard, commented on Terry’s beard.

He’d been growing it since 1975 in anticipation of a 1976 bicentennial contest — thus, his nicknames — “Hair” and “Hippy.”

“They used to say I looked like ZZ Top; now they say Duck Dynasty,” he said. Later, he told me, “People, when they see me, they’ll think bad things until they know me, and they’ll think great things.”

Terry and his brother, Brian, had been on their way to church that morning when Terry noticed something in the “dead center” of the road near their house.

Terry said he backed up and picked up the wallet. At this point, Terry, who is not a whisperer, stood up from the booth.

“For demonstration purposes only,” he said, laying the wallet on the table and pulling a dollar bill where it peeked out of the wallet, “this is the way I found it. I was hoping there was $5 or $6 in it, and I was gonna drop it in the church bucket and be done with it.”

There was a bit more than $6 in it. When they talked on the phone, Terry asked my brother how much money he had in the wallet. My brother said at least a “couple hundred dollars.”

Try $500.

Here is where Terry Sevener could have slipped $300 into his pocket. But he didn’t.

As we talked in the restaurant, my brother said, “Well, here’s a little reward for you – $50. Do you think that’s fair?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Terry said. “I’m thinking the Lord — the 10 percent. I wasn’t gonna ask you for a dime. I’m flat broke.”

The man said he had lost $50 not long ago after cashing in some change and going to the tobacco store, so he figured the $50 reward would replace it.

He went to a lot of trouble to return my brother’s wallet, which also contained my brother’s bank card, hunting licenses and plenty of personal information.

When the man found my brother’s name and office number in the phone book, the answering service originally wasn’t cooperative.

“I had to get rough with them,” Terry said. “I like going off on people on the phone. I said, ‘How do I know he’s not laying dead in a ditch?’ I’ve got his wallet!’ They put me on hold.”

At some point, I looked around the restaurant, packed with the after-church lunch crowd, and every single person was looking at us, some pausing midbite.

NASCAR fan Terry also regaled us with his interesting theory of too much water causing high blood pressure (“I make doctors think,” he said) and how he once “wrassled” with the Secret Service when former President Bill Clinton came to town.

My brother told Terry to let him know if he ever needed medical care and thanked him profusely before we left.

I told Terry I couldn’t believe we didn’t find the wallet ourselves.

“You blew it — so God sent in the A team!” he told us.

Terry told me later that he knew we expected “a little old lady, or somebody in a business suit” to have found the wallet. Yes, I relearned a lesson about not judging someone by his looks.

My brother said that getting to meet the famous Sevener brothers was worth losing his wallet.

Terry called my brother a couple of hours later to share some good news. He’d gone to the tobacco store with his $50 and bought a lottery ticket. He won $35.

He told my brother: “Remember to keep an open heart and an open mind.”

Wise words from a great man.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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