A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 13
Interesting real-life story: Man’s wallet returned 40 years later:
Rudolph R. Resta, 77, walked out of a wintry rain recently, through the revolving door of a largely empty Times Square office building, and into his distant past.
He found his two sons, now in their 40s, when they were small enough to fit into the same lawn chair, side by side. He found his wife, Angela, posing before a knife-sharp Pontiac Grand Prix in Prospect Park, looking very sultry in a jaguar stole; “real jaguar,” he said, “not the stuff they have today.” He found a picture of his father, Nicola, that he once worried he would never see again. He found a Social Security card issued by the Federal Security Agency (the office hasn’t existed since 1953) and an American Express card so old that it wasn’t green, it was purple and white. (Member Since 64.)
In fact, Mr. Resta found just about everything with which a well-stocked wallet would have bulged in 1970. Except, of course, the cash he carried on the day he carelessly left the wallet in a jacket pocket in an unattended coat closet on the second floor of The New York Times headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street, where he worked as an art director in the promotion department.
When Mr. Resta went to fetch his jacket at lunchtime on that long-ago day, the wallet was gone. He wasn’t to see it again for 40 years. The reunion was made possible by José Cisneros, 46, a security guard who works in the former Times building, now called the Times Square Building. He came across the wallet last fall when he was investigating a void between an old unused window on the second floor and the masonry seal behind it. The wallet had apparently been stashed there after a thief found it in the coat closet and pulled out the cash.
The wallet was returned to its rightful owner. And there we have a variation on a theme found in numerous stories: Finding an object that belongs to another person as the Call To Action. For example:
* Message in a Bottle (1999): A woman discovers a tragic love letter in a bottle on a beach, and is determined to track down its author.
* Letters to Juliet (2010): An American girl on vacation in Italy finds an unanswered “letter to Juliet” — one of thousands of missives left at the fictional lover’s Verona courtyard…
Those are romance stories, but there are other types:
* A Simple Plan (1998): Two brothers and a friend find $4 million in the cockpit of a downed plane. The pilot is dead. No one is looking for the money. To keep it, all they have to do is wait. IT ALL SOUNDED SO SIMPLE…
* The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): In a small village in the Shire a young Hobbit named Frodo has been entrusted with an ancient Ring. Now he must embark on an Epic quest to the Cracks of Doom in order to destroy it.
So somebody finds something. That something has a history. It opens the door to adventure. A mystery. A task. A possibility.
What if your Protagonist finds a wallet stashed somewhere for 40 years. Your Protagonist takes it upon him/herself to return it. And look. They’ve found the house of the owner. They walk up the stairs. Knock on the door. The door opens…
Now what happens?