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Sometimes, it only takes one act of kindness to change a person’s life

That was certainly the case earlier this week, when Dan Kirk was heading for Centralia. He was driving on a road near Highway 6 and saw something in the middle of the street. It was a wallet.

Kirk pulled over and discovered that a driver’s license, credit cards, a social security card, and cash had fallen out.

“I’ll be honest, I was in a bit of shock,” he told ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Gee and Ursula on the show Wednesday. “There were papers, personal belongings and a whole bunch of cash, flying around in the wind,” he said.

It was eighteen $100 dollar bills, to be exact.

Some of the bills had flown off the edge of the road and towards a nearby river. Kirk ran around collecting everything to make sure nothing was missing. Although it was a lot of cash, keeping the wallet never crossed his mind. He looked through it and found some papers that helped him track down the owner.

It belonged to a man named Rob, whose family had to move because the pandemic forced their landlord to sell the house they were renting. They had to find a home quickly and rushed to sell a lot of their belongings to raise the money needed to move into their new home. That was the money in his wallet, which, in his rush to move, he accidentally left on the roof of his car.

Halfway to their destination, he realized what he had done and they turned around and went back to their old house.

“My middle daughter and I walked the six miles, back and forth, looking in the ditches, hoping to find my wallet. I was just devastated,” he told Gee and Ursula.

But then a few hours later, he got a call from a local restaurant that Kirk had contacted and learned that his wallet had been found, with all the money intact.

The two met in Puyallup Tuesday night and Rob gave Kirk a big hug and thanked him profusely.

“It was amazing because I was so stressed out about how I was going to pay for our new home. That was all the money we had. I’m just grateful for the amazing people that are in this world, like Dan,” he said.

Dan Kirk is an example of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. For the last few months, he has been sending my 89-year-old father hand-written letters, just to make sure he gets something in the mail on occasion while he is in an assisted living center during the pandemic. His acts of kindness are greatly appreciated by our family as well.

Listen to the Gee and Ursula Show weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.