A Narrow Escape

A holiday in Penang was an annual affair for my family. My parents grew up in Penang and are very fond of Penang food. In December every year, we would drive up to the island to spend three days visiting their favorite restaurants.

This year, we started our journey up north on a Friday morning. The drive up was punctuated (不时打断) by stops at Bidor town and Kampar so it took us six hours to reach our destination. We always stayed at one of the hotels in Batu Ferringhi. The beach was just a short walk from the hotel entrance and our rooms had a lovely view of the sea. We spent our first evening playing on the beach. After dinner, we returned to our rooms to play card games. Mу parents had a rule for our holidays which was that we spent time doing things together. There was to be no TV and no internet. We really enjoyed ourselves together.

The next morning, we went to Bukit Bendera, the Malay name of the Penang Hill, and then spent the rest of the afternoon in town visiting our favorite shops. These lovely shops never failed to amaze us. As we were having tea at a coffee shop, we overheard people talking about an earthquake near Sumatra, an island in Indonesia. We headed back to the hotel and then went to the beach. We took a walk along the beach, picking up seashells. Suddenly I noticed a strange thing. The sea seemed to be retreating(后退) from the shore. I called my father to look at the curious occurrence. My father took one look and went pale. We saw a grey line in the distance moving towards the shore. It seemed to grow taller by the second.

Sometimes you can count on (指望) people to do the right thing. When Dave Tally found a backpack with a laptop and an envelope full of cash in 2010, he could have considered it a very lucky day. The homeless man counted $3,300 in the bag, an amount that would make a huge difference in his life. However, as tempting (诱人的) as it was to keep the money, deep down he knew it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Back then, Tally was sleeping in the basements of local churches and trying to save up enough money to fix his only source of transportation: his bike. That money could have bought him, a brand new one. Instead, he turned the bag to his boss at the Tempe Community Action Agency, an organization that helps homeless people in the area find jobs. Tally had been working there part-time.

“Finding the envelope with the cash was just exciting. There were lots of crazy thoughts that went through my head,” Tally told ABC News at the time. “I went into the survival mode for a moment, actually more than a moment, thinking about all the things I could do for myself.”

“I beat myself up pretty hard for even thinking I would spend one cent of that person’s money,” Tally added.

After Tally made up his mind to return the bag, he faced the problem of tracking down its owner. There were no identifiers on the backpack or a way to get into the laptop without a password. But then someone suggested checking the flash drive (闪存盘) that they’d also found inside the bag to see if it held any clues (线索).

It sure did. Arizona State University student Bryan Belanger had uploaded his resume (简历) to the drive, easily providing Tally with his contact information. As it turned out, Bryan Belanger was carrying that cash because he was buying a used car from Craigslist website, and he accidentally left his belongings in a station on the way to work.

Belanger was regretful for his carelessness and thought his backpack was gone forever.

Tally said the day he found the money’s rightful owner was the day his life changed.

I’m not much of a hugger, but I have Grandma a hug when we walked into her house. I tried not to look at Grandpa’s chair but saw it anyway. It still looked the same: worn-out white leather, pointed at the television. Even the green afghan (针织毛毯) was there, as if Grandpa were going to sit down and pull it over his legs.

“Let’s go look for crawdads (淡水螯虾)!” Scott, one of my twin cousins yelled and Matt, Scott’s brother ran to the hall closet to pull out the long skinny crawdad trap—Grandpa’s trap. They acted as if Grandpa hadn’t died during the winter.

I was holding that trap in my hands last summer when Grandpa asked me if I wanted to stay and help him teach Jonathan, my little brother, how to play dominoes (多米诺骨牌). I said no-I wanted to catch crawdads with my cousins.

Grandpa had been the one who’d taught us all how to catch crawdads, but he was sick then, so he stayed behind.

When Grandpa died, all I could think about was the dominoes. I’d said no, and now there wouldn’t be any more dominoes with Grandpa.

“Hey, Nick, are you coming?” Scott asked from the doorway, I was leaving with them when my Mom asked me to take Jonathan with me. The four of us ran down the narrow trail that led from Grandma’s house to the creek (小溪), then followed the creek until it spilled into a deep pool.

We lowered the crawdad trap into one end of the pool, the way Grandpa had shown us. Then we took off our shirts and shoes and jumped in. The ice-cold water was a shock. We all sprang out almost as quickly as we’d gone in. After that we took turns daring each other to jump into the water. Just as we were all happily enjoying ourselves, Scott found that Jonathon was shaking from his teeth to his toes. Not knowing how to deal with it, I took Jonathan back to Grandma’s house.

Mom and Grandma wrapped Jonathan in Grandpa’s green afghan, put him in Grandpa’s chair and make him some hot cocoa to warm him up. Grandma also asked me to stay for cocoa, but I wanted to join my cousins in the creek.

As I headed back to the creek, I saw Jonathan sitting in front of the blank TV screen.

I walked over to Jonathon and asked “Did Grandpa ever teach you to play dominoes?”