Every week lately, I've been participating in MamaKat's Writer's Workshop. It's kind of fun and it does help me a little to have that little extra bit of guidance through her weekly prompts. This week, the prompt I have chosen is to tell how a stranger helped you.

This is actually a different kind of a story than you would expect. This isn't a case of someone stopping to help when my car broke down, or bringing over groceries during a difficult time, but it is a story of how someone's honesty can change the course of a person's life.

The story starts, oddly enough, with my Dad's old guitar. It's been a long time since my Dad died. I'm kind of embarassed to admit that I don't honestly remember how long it's been. I remember he died on June 7th and that it was a Tuesday, but I can't for the life of me remember how many years ago - about 15, I think. Anyway, Dad didn't have a lot in the way of possessions, but one of the few things he left behind was his old Martin guitar. It was a beautiful guitar with mother-of-pearl inlays and a nice case, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Dad left me his guitar because I had played a bit as a teenager and it was one of the few things we shared. I played it a few times, but I was kind of over my "music phase" by then and for the most part, the guitar sat in it's case in the closet for probably 10 or 12 years. At one point, I even had it in the basement near the water heater.

Anyway, somewhere along the line, a musician friend of ours suggested that it might be valuable enough to get it appraised and added to our insurance in case something happened to it. The first place we took asked said that it "might" be worth a couple of hundred dollars, but said that the neck was warped, so it would need to be repaired. So, we took it to another place to get an estimate on the repairs.

That was probably the luckiest move we'd even made in our lives. When we brought it in to these guys, they got all excited and started looking in reference books and calculating numbers. That was when they told us what it was worth:

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

Yes, you read that right. My Dad's old guitar that had been sitting gathering dust in a closet was worth

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

Naturally, my first reaction was "Yeah right, what idiot is going to pay that kind of money for a guitar?" So, they offered us forty thousand dollars cash right on the spot.

We were so shocked, I accepted their offer and was standing on the sidewalk with a shell-shocked look on my face and $40,000 in my hot little hand, ten minutes later. I never even got a picture of the guitar. I mean, how random is that?

I know what you are thinking - why was I dumb enough to take $40,000 for a guitar that was worth $50,000? You know, I didn't even care. These guys were honest enough to tell me what that guitar was really worth when they could have lied their butts off and told us it was worth almost nothing and we would have totally believed them. And if we'd held out for more money, we would probably have driven ourselves crazy trying to trying to find a buyer and arrange all the paperwork and probably had to hassle with shipping it to somewhere, who knows what a hassle it would have been?

It was totally worth $10,000 to me to be standing there on that sidewalk with that money right in my hand with almost all the possibilities of the world open to me after just a ten minute transaction.

So what did we do with the money? Well, at that point, we had been busting our butts for two years to get out of about $20,000 worth of debt. GONE! I was driving an old beat-up Taurus that was about to die. GONE! We bought a nice used Caravan that was something I'd wanted for a long time. Our couch and dining room set was about ten years old and all scratched up and falling apart. GONE! And then we put the small amount that remained into our savings account for a rainy day.

This was about five years ago, but I am still shell-shocked about how it all worked out. It's like my own personal miracle. At first, I was a little worried that my Dad might have been upset about me selling his precious guitar, but actually I think he would have been horrified that we had something that valuable hanging around the house, especially in places where it could be damaged or stolen. And I'd like to think he would have been so pleased to know that it provided some help to us when we needed it. When I get to heaven, it's the first thing I'm going to ask him.





By TwitterButtons.com