A little over a week ago I was in St Maarten with my family and had spent much of the late morning shopping in Marigot. When we finally tired of that, and after fueling our hunger in a small café, we poured ourselves in one of hundreds of island cabs and headed for the beach where we spent the afternoon getting lost in the sea. Time had passed quickly and my mother realized that she no longer had her camera. With the sun beating hot, I watched as she emptied her beach bag with no luck. We finally concluded that the camera had slipped out of her pocket while in the cab. Of course we also knew that the likelihood of getting the camera back was slim to none; after all, we had no way of differentiating our cab from other cabs, nor our driver from other drivers. Naturally, I had already passed the camera off as a lost cause and vowed to buy my mother a new one, claiming that it was just a camera and no big deal. It was then that my mother began to list the memorable moments in her life that had been stored on that particular memory card in the past year and a half. Suddenly feeling a wave of grief, I knew that it was not just the camera she was after, but hundreds of beautiful memories that she had captured forever by freezing them in pictures. I excused myself from my beach chair and made my way across the thick sand to the nearest open bar stool. There, I flagged down the tender, who very quickly wanted to sell me the entire well. When I explained that I only needed him to contact a cab, any cab near Marigot, he looked at me in disbelief. Fortunately for me, he must have pitied me and my situation and agreed to make the call. As the tender turned towards the phone, I turned to face the water. It was then that I saw someone I recognized, someone who I thought I would never see again. It was our cab driver! There he was, walking towards me in the sand, waving with my mother’s camera in his hand. I was so ecstatic I wanted to throw my arms around this complete stranger, who went on to explain how he had been nearly an hour away, on the opposite side of the island, with other passengers in tow. He said it was then that he noticed the camera and realized who it must have belonged to.

With an empty cab, this sweet man had driven miles out of the way, voluntarily giving up fares, to return to where he had dropped us off. He then proceeded to comb the beach in search of the owners of this digital pocket-sized camera that probably meant absolutely nothing to him. My mother was, of course, delighted and we were all so very thankful for the individual who did what he didn’t have to do. Regrettably, I never did get his name. For now, I think I will just call him our Saint Anthony…