Cool Stuff I Found This Summer

Money was only the beginning.

The streets weren’t paved with gold in the Croatian beach town, but I did find money many times on this beautiful walkway.

Thanks to gravity, I’m always finding things in the street wherever I am — money, phones, important documents, sheets of postage stamps, even the occasional bag of reefer.

This situation arises partly because I’m a petite thang whose eyes are closer to the ground than most people’s and partly because I’m always looking down, trying to avoid walking into gaping holes while simultaneously searching out stray bills.

Anybody who strolls with me knows about my cash-finding compulsion since I’m always studying litter and looking for money and they’re always saying, “No, Melissa, that’s just a sugar packet!” and “No, Melissa, that’s just a candy bar wrapper!” or “Oh God, Melissa, put that down!” But sometimes they are wrong. And they always insist on splitting the find.

This summer, which I’ve been spending in a fetching Croatian town on the Adriatic Sea, my friend Brigitte kicked off a lovely trend — and it did become a trend — by discovering a 10-euro note on the deserted walkway.

The next week, at almost the exact spot, I found a five-euro bill, and the week after that — on my way to the hair salon — I found a ten-euro note, which was handy since that was exactly the price of a “wash-n-blow dry” at that wonderful beauty parlor.

But my most enchanting discovery was the result of Day Z, a Corgi with one blue eye and one brown, whom I often took for walks in the beach village.

Treasure-finding Day Z and her original owner, the late, great Croatian photographer Mario Lalich.

On that particular day’s walk, Day Z kept pulling me towards a parking lot and I kept pulling her back, but, luckily, she was insistent, winning The Leash Battle — and leading me into the parking lot and straight to a ten-euro note.

Delighted, I swooped up the ten from the gravel in the entirely empty lot. Then 20 feet away, I noticed another ten. And not far from that, another ten. And 15 feet from that another ten. I have frequent dreams about finding money in this manner — albeit with much larger bills. Nevertheless, coming across 40 euros in waking life in a Parking Lot Treasure Hunt was entirely magical.

Tina Lalic (left), who kindly invited me to stay with her in Croatia for the summer.

Side note: In mid-September 2001, I was walking my sister’s dog, Casey, in New York’s West Village. Casey led me straight to a dollar bill. When I picked up that dollar, I got a weird feeling — and felt like I was going to puke — and that was before I saw that part of it was burnt in an odd way, a corner here, some of the middle, and dots of torched paper across it. It filled me with such a bad vibe that I immediately gave it to a transient. The transient, who apparently couldn’t talk. kept pointing up to the sky, and I kept pointing down, saying “No, I found it on the ground.” It wasn’t for a week that I realized the bill had probably come from one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.

The Phone Connection

Earlier this year, while in Barcelona — where I’ve also come across sidewalk money many times — I found a phone on the bus. I considered giving it to the bus driver but decided instead to find the owner. He had a peculiar last name — something like Marjorami. So I started writing to all the Marjoramis in Barcelona — via Facebook and via websites.

Finally one of the Marjoramis contacted me, saying that the kid who’d lost the phone was his cousin. Alas, the Marjorami who contacted me was estranged from that branch of the family, so he couldn’t put me in touch.

However, the Estranged Relative wrote the next day saying he’d contacted the grandmother and passed on my number. The kid who’d lost the phone called to arrange a pickup time and place. The kid’s mother called to thank me. And the Estranged Relative wrote again the next day, thanking me and saying that due to that found phone on the bus, he’d patched things up with that branch of the family.

So I was filled with warm, happy feelings — though not quite as warm and happy as when I found the magical forty euros in the parking lot.

The Barcelona Civil Registry: Fun Times.

^{The Accursed Cedilla and The Orange Folder}

However, there was another find this year in Barcelona that still has me perplexed. This one was not on a sidewalk or street, but at a café, where I found an orange folder on the seat. The café was located right in front of Barcelona’s Civil Registry, where people get married after jumping through five million bureaucratic hoops and tearing out their hair.

For example, my marriage to Javier was held up for a year at the Barcelona Civil Registry because some extremely alert and uptight bureaucrat noted that Javier’s identity papers in Spain had a cedilla, which looks like this — ç. That cedilla was on the fifth of the six names that make up Javier’s full nombre familiar, since a name in Spain gives you the whole family tree going back to the times of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand.

Problematically — at least for the obsessively uptight clerk — Javier’s typewritten birth certificate (from Venezuela) just had a normal “c” on the fifth of the six names, since in Venezuela they didn’t have a cedilla on their typewriters back when he was born.

Oh, the hell we paid for that inconsistency. The cedilla-discovering investigative clerk — apparently hoping to win the Nobel Prize in Bureaucracy — refused to proceed further. The names had to match — and because of that little cedilla tail, the identification papers did not match! So she shooed us away.

For months, Javier and I went back to the Barcelona Civil Registry seeking a solution — with bureaucrats telling us in all seriousness that we’d have to sue the country of Venezuela in order to address the non-matching name situation. Finally, one clerk, seeing us there week after week, took pity on us, and put the matter before a judge. Before too long, the judge had dismissed the Cedilla Problema — and we carried on with jumping through the other tortuous administrative hoops that still took another three months to get through.

So that day in Barcelona when I found the orange folder on the chair of the café in front of the Civil Registry, I felt horrible when I scanned the papers it held. They were marriage documents — including one that had the title in Spanish of “Announcement of an Upcoming Muslim Marriage.”

I found it interesting that Spain requires an official announcement for upcoming Muslim marriages but even more I felt awful for whoever had forgotten the documents at the café, knowing full well all the hell they’d gone through to get the marriage papers in order.

So I wrote down their names.

The Marriage Mystery

The man was Russian and he had an odd name, like Boris Baraguglokivytch and the woman, who was Malaysian, had a name like Oonapaloona Ooloong. I thought about taking their papers to the Civil Registry building, but the thought of stepping in that place voluntarily made me shudder. So instead I handed the folder to the waiter saying someone had left these papers and they looked important.

Back at home, I wrote to Boris Baraguglokyvitch — who, I discovered, is a Russian professor — and told him I’d found his papers and gave him the name of the café.

The first day I didn’t hear back from Boris, however.

And this prompted assorted scenarios to play out in my head. I kept wondering if Boris and Oonapaloona had stopped by the café and, exhausted by the gazillion hurdles of the marriage registry process, they’d had a huge fight — and left the papers there on purpose. “To hell with you, there will be no marriage!” one or the other said in scenario one, stomping out of the café.

Then I wondered if when Oonapaloona (or Boris) discovered that her fiancé (or his fiancée) after months of hoop-jumping had LOST THE MARRIAGE PAPERS that she (or he) simply murdered him (or her.) Or maybe Oonapaloona had left crying and headed to the airport and back to Malaysia.

The scenarios kept growing more dramatic in my head, when, thankfully, Boris halted my imagination, by emailing me. He thanked me, saying that, indeed, he’d been at that café the day before and was heading there shortly to pick up the papers.

Thank God, I thought to myself, Boris is alive! The marriage to his beloved Oonapaloona is still on!

But then Boris emailed me a few hours later.

He thanked me again, but asked why did I think those papers were his?

I wrote back and said because of the announcement of an upcoming Muslim marriage that listed him as the husband. Did the café waiter give him the orange folder, I asked.

He wrote back and affirmed he’d been handed the orange folder containing official papers. But, he said, they weren’t his. They belonged to a woman he’d never met or even heard of.

So the marriage between Boris and Oonapaloona wasn’t happening after all! They didn’t even know each other!

I’m not sure if he’d missed the document about an upcoming Muslim marriage, then I briefly wondered if he were lying — but why would he write to lie to a stranger? So months later, I’m still puzzling that one — and wishing I hadn’t thrown out the piece of paper on which I written Oonapaloona’s correctly spelled full name.

My point: there’s a whole wild world swirling around at our feet for those who bother to study the sidewalk and street — or who look over at the empty seat. So be curious! And look down! And magic may unfold right before your very eyes or at least a mystery or two.