The Stranger and the $20 Bill

This synchro came from Renee Prince, whose stories we’ve used before. This one really underscores how synchronicity connects us to other people.

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My mother and I were  at a Native American (Indian) casino when she called me from somewhere inside the building and asked me to meet her because “something weird” had happened and she couldn’t tell me over the phone. When I got to her, she wore a stunned expression and an amazed smile.

She told me that she had been sitting at a slot machine, feeling really, really bad. She was agonizing over her husband’s Alzheimer’s and worrying over how she would pay for her husband’s nursing home when he had to go, worrying over the possibility of her having another stroke… But she hadn’t been talking to anyone—she was just sitting by herself.

Then a cocktail waitress came up to her and handed her a $20 bill. The waitress said that a man had given her the bill and asked her to give it to my mother “so she would know things weren’t as bad as she thought.” When my mother asked the waitress to point him out, the man had disappeared. She was very touched and awe-stricken—nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She says she will keep the $20 bill and never spend it.

The next day, my mother had just gotten dressed, and came out of her room wearing a “new” necklace and a strange expression. The necklace was a beaded thing with a tiny Native American “medicine pouch”, and it was a used item, something my sister Sonja had given her a few years ago as a stocking stuffer. Sonja often buys bags of jewelry at garage sales, hoping for diamonds or gold in the usually costume stuff, and she had just given my mother the beaded necklace without looking inside the pouch, since it seemed flat and empty. But for some reason my mother had looked inside when she put it on that morning and found—a $20 bill.