Young at heart
91-year-old Vesta (Candy) Clark frequents the trails of Trenton Park, and shows no signs of slowing down.
WESTVILLE, N.S. — Imagine you are on a pension, and all your Christmas money is in your wallet. You climb out of your friend’s pickup truck, walk into your house and, a little while later, realize your wallet is no longer in your possession.
“I never thought I’d see it again,” Larry MacKay said of that very situation that occurred on the afternoon of Dec. 12. “I thought that $650 was gone.”
MacKay searched for the wallet in the area of his Diamond Street home but came up empty.
Around 3 p.m. that day, Town of Westville public works employees Allan Avery and Christopher Selig were doing a street check on Acadia Avenue — strictly routine stuff — when Avery spotted a wallet lying on the pavement.
“When I noticed it,” Avery says, “the wallet was open and I could see the money in there.”
With a car cruising behind their town truck, they put on the brakes and Selig got out of the vehicle to retrieve the wallet.
Selig had a pretty good idea who the wallet belonged to but wasn’t entirely certain, so he turned it over to the Westville police department. After MacKay’s son Jonathan put the word out on social media, his father soon had his wallet returned, money intact.
MacKay figures the wallet slipped out of his back pocket while he had been exiting his friend’s truck, landed on the runner of the truck and stayed there until it flew off on Acadia Avenue.
“Those guys deserve a huge ‘thank you,’” Jonathan MacKay says. “We truly expected that if we got anything back, it would have just been an empty wallet. It is quite a wonderful Christmas miracle for us.”
It might have been tempting — at least for some — to keep the money, especially considering the holiday season is at hand.
But that was never an option for the two men who found it.
Selig just shrugs and says, “I’d want somebody to do the same for me.”