About 30 years ago I had hit bottom; emotionally and financially devastated, one step from being homeless, had a new job barely above minimum wage, with barely enough money to carry me over to my first paycheck which was a week away. I was already going hungry, with one small mid-day meal per day.

With one fifty dollar bill to my name which I needed to last two weeks, I walked out of my humble pad one morning headed for work, and walked the usual half mile, boarded a bus, two transfers, including a half-mile walk between stops.

At lunch I realized with a shock that my money was gone, I had lost it. And dude I was HUNGRY, my stomach was growling, I was utterly miserable and felt like an idiot. So OK. What am I going do now? I was in a strange city with no real friends to borrow money or food from. This could get serious.

So I left work at 5:00 hungry as hell, mind racing, wondering what I was going to do for food. To top it off, it had snowed heavily that day - maybe six or eight inches - rendering the likelihood of my finding my money zilch, assuming there ever WAS even the remotest possibility that I could ever find it even if it had NOT snowed and that someone else HADN'T found it first.

Bummed out and hungry, I retraced my footsteps all the way back home, and, on the last stretch to my flop house, on a sidewalk with a busy flow of foot traffic, people bumping into and squeezing by one another, I glanced down, and saw the tiniest sliver of paper protruding from under a patch of snow. It was no more than 1/8th of an inch by 1/4 inch, and I absent-mindedly bent over and picked it up, and out from the snow patch came my 50 dollar bill. :)