Monday, August 10, 2009

There's no place like home...

I moved yesterday for the eighth time in nine years. 

Just let that sink in for a second. 

And with any luck, next summer I will move for the ninth time in 10 years. In fact, as I watched my furniture enter my newest apartment, I mentally inventoried what would not be coming with me next year. It was comforting.

Our place still looks like a bomb went off, even after two days of organizing. Granted, now it looks more like it was a poorly constructed homemade bomb rather than one of the atomic variety, but still, more chaos than I'm totally comfortable with.

However, karma came down on me like an anvil this morning (the timing!). I remembered I should be grateful for having a roof over my head when I found two stories about homeless individuals. Oddly enough they both involved those people having more personal wealth than I will probably see in a lifetime. 

Zee News reported on the donation of $100,000 to Hebrew University in Jerusalem from the estate of a homeless woman in Manhattan. The woman, a Holocaust survivor, died two years ago at the age of 92 and requested her donation be used for scholarships for medical research students. Her last known job was for a New Yorker who paid her in room and board for moving his car around to avoid parking tickets. 

In the other story, a homeless man named Richard Walters left an unexpected $4 million in gifts to charities in Phoenix, Ariz. Walters, also deceased in 2007, was a retired engineer and apparently renounced worldly goods when he left the working world. According to a friend at the Catholic Mission, he slept on the mission's grounds, used its telephone and ate in its cafeteria. Among his few possessions was a radio; he enjoyed NPR's programming and included the station in his will, according to the NPR website. 

(Photo courtesy of wetcircuit.com)

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