What Do You Really Know About Your Family? What Do You Know About Anyone?

It all started at The Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop in Bluffton, South Carolina.  As the story goes, one day a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra to pay for everyone who ordered after her. One by one the food and coffee orders were filled.  Every few months the same woman has returned to leave another donation with the same request.

But it doesn't stop there.  Other customers have been leaving money to pay for others' food. Some people don't even buy anything when they come in; they just stop to donate and head right back out.  In this day and age the kindness of strangers trumps the greed of Wall Street. 

What does this story have to do with a battered suitcase? Ted Gup, a former investigative reporter for The Washington Post and TIME magazine is handed a suitcase which has laid undisturbed in his mother's attic for some 70 years.  Folded inside the suitcase are hand-written letters sent to a man Gup comes to learn is his grandfather.  The letters are responses to a tiny newspaper ad that promises a $5.00 Christmas donation to be given to folks in Canton, Ohio in 1933 who request such aid - and both the giver and recipient to remain anonymous.   

To us that $5.00 might just buy a coffee drink and muffin at The Corner Perk.  In 1933 - during the Great Depression - if you had the coins you could buy a loaf of bread for seven cents, a pound of hamburger for eleven cents, a dozen egs for twenty-nine cents, and a gallon of gas for eighteen cents.  $5.00 would be the Christmas miracle.

Gup's book, "A Secret Gift," is a time travel back to the Great Depression; a trip eerily reminiscent of the past few years of financial crisis to which he makes frequent reference.  His investigation uncovers intimate layers of community, generosity, and family secrets.  What is heartening is the message of endurance and recovery in the face of a stranger's kindness.

What do you really know about your family?  What do you really know of compassion, suffering, community, loss, humility, resilience, gratitude, perseverance, joy, sharing, inspiration?  Ask for one story - be prepared to receive a treasure trove.