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Wednesday, December 18, 2024

It Was "A 50-cent Holiday Miracle on Eighth Ave." Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading an article in my local newspaper titled "It was a 50-cent holiday miracle on Eighth Ave."  Story went like this... In 1955, I was an 11-year-old boy, one of four children living with my family in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.   My parents struggled to support us.  They kept track of every dime.  A week or so before Christmas, my sister, who was 8, and I decided to go window-shopping at a neighborhood mom-and-pop consignment store on Eighth Avenue.  It was in front of a bus stop.  We wanted to buy something for our mother, but we didn't have any money and weren't sure how to earn some.  We looked in the window and saw a beautiful serving platter - well, it was beautiful to us - made of tin or some other cheap material.  The price was 50 cents.  We talked about how we wished we had the money to buy it.  As we started to walk away, we saw two quarters land on the ground nearby.  Amazed, we picked them up.  We realized that a man we had seen standing at the bus stop must have dropped the quarters there for us.  We brought them over to him.  "They aren't mine," he said with a smile.  "They aren't ours either," we said.  Moments later, the bus came and he left us there with the two quarters.  So, we took both quarters into the store and bought the platter.  We "gift wrapped" it in a brown bag on Christmas Eve.  On Christmas morning our mom opened the "gift" and with tears in her eyes -- as well as in ours -- we hugged and kissed each other.  We were so happy and so blessed.  Merry Christmas, everyone. The author of this beautiful story, "Arnold Krakow" lives in nearby Manheim Township were I went to school for 12 years and taught school for another 35 years.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.  

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