Lakeport >> On the afternoon of Jan. 5 Christopher Blocher found a wallet laying in the Safeway parking lot. It contained upwards of $600, numerous credit cards and even a social security card. Rather than risk the belongings falling into the wrong hands, he knew his best option was to return the wallet personally.
“I’ve just seen enough TV and just been around in life to know that people just do not do the right thing anymore,” Blocher explained.
“He wanted to make sure that she got it back pretty quick,” said his father, Bruce Blocher, adding that the woman was in her 80s and he assumed the money was meant for expenses. The loss would have been devastating.
The wallet’s owner, who preferred to remain anonymous, verified that the large amount of cash she was carrying around, much of which was Christmas money, was going somewhere important — dental surgery for her dog, a six-year-old Maltese.
Chistopher Blocher glanced over the identification in the wallet and found that the owner lived not far from the Lakeport grocery store, so he drove to her home. But at that moment, she was at Safeway inquiring about a lost billfold. On receiving a negative response, the woman felt sick.
“You’re just blown away because it isn’t just the money, it’s everything you own is in that little baby,” she said.
Little did she know, Blocher was waiting for her return. Moments after she walked back inside, Blocher knocked on her door. When she answered, Bruce Blocher, who witnessed the exchange unfold, read the concern across her face.
“You could tell she was really stressed out about it,” he said.
Standing outside her front door, Christopher Blocher asked, “Did you lose something?”
Then he pulled out her wallet. The woman teared up.
“She was happy, happy, happy,” his father added.
After taking stock of her wallet, she was shocked to find everything was just the same as she’d left it. “She was just like, ‘oh my god, how can somebody be that nice?’” Christopher Blocher recalled.
Two weeks later and the surprise has yet to dissipate.
“I still don’t know what made the kid do it, but he returned it,” she said. “I said, ‘my god, your mother must be very proud of you — and I mean very proud of you — young man.’”
She assumed her cash, cards and other important items were lost forever. And if Blocher hadn’t found them, that may have been the case. “In the wrong hands somebody could have taken that money,” he said. “I know how that goes. If you lose something you never get it back, especially nowadays.”
His father had the same thoughts. “It was a really neat kind of thing to watch,” Bruce Blocher said. “Usually in Lakeport you lose that much, it’s gone.”
Before Christopher Blocher and the woman parted, he asked if he could give her a hug. She couldn’t stop the tears as they burst from her.
“He is a reason to have a faith in human beings,” she said.
It wasn’t the first time Blocher stumbled upon forgotten belongings. Within the last year, he’s found two other wallets in Lakeport, and personally returned each. The first time he found the owner through Facebook. The other instance, he tracked them down with the help of a friend.
Blocher attributed his moral compass to his upbringing. Bruce Blocher said from a young age his son had always been exceptionally honest. “I was raised great by two great parents,” Christopher Blocher said. “They taught me right.”
It also comes down to personal experience. A decade ago, Christopher Blocher said he was hit by a drunk driver, and he’s been struggling to make ends meet since. It was easy to put himself in the woman’s shoes, since the loss of his own wallet would hit him hard.
“It was probably her bill money,” Blocher guessed. “I would hope somebody else would give me my stuff back with everything in it.”
He wants people to know that with the seemingly constant stream of bad news, there are plenty of positives in the world, too. “There are still good people out there,” he expressed. “I’d just like to let people know that people are still out there … not out to mess with people or steal from people.”
And after this whole ordeal, the wallet’s owner gained a new, more optimistic outlook on the state of things.
“Without people like Chris I’d be up a creek without a paddle,” she said. “When you do get the point in your life where you think that life sucks, it doesn’t because then somebody like him shows up and it makes a difference.”
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
