From the Lost and Found Department, a Happy Return

This isn’t a story about life’s hard knocks. If it were, though, Carmelita Lustig could be the center of that one too.

Instead, for today, and especially for this Thanksgiving season, let’s look past the staggering series of blows the Huntington Beach woman has encountered in her life and zero in on one simple act of charity last Sunday inside a McDonald’s restaurant in Orange. You can then decide for yourself whether the story was one worth the telling.

Now 58, Carmelita was born into an Italian family where legend had it that her grandmother was a countess who was disowned and sent away with an eternal curse. Carmelita is her grandmother’s namesake. “I’ve had a lot of things thrown at me,” she says, “but when I look back, I know the hand of God has been on me my entire life.”

Raped at 14, Carmelita had a daughter whom she put up for adoption. Carmelita didn’t talk to her daughter until she was a teenager--and then by phone--and didn’t see her in person until she was 37. A chronic diabetic, her daughter killed herself shortly thereafter, Carmelita says.

In 1982, Carmelita had a double mastectomy to combat breast cancer. She believed she was cancer-free until 1995 when doctors discovered ovarian cancer. For the last year, she’s been undergoing chemotherapy, and so it was that last Sunday morning “it took so much effort to get out of bed.”

But get up she did, because it was Sunday and that meant she had to make it out to Orange, where her 33-year-old daughter, Joanie, who is mentally disabled, lives in a group home and “waits by the window for her mama.” As always, Joanie picked the restaurant for lunch and, last Sunday, she picked McDonald’s.

Shortly after arriving, Carmelita saw a red purse that had been left in the restaurant. She didn’t look in the purse, she just gave it to the manager.

Later, as she and Joanie were leaving, Carmelita saw a man’s wallet on the floor near the door.

Again, she turned it in. “I said, ‘You won’t believe this, but I’m the lady who found the purse, and I just now found this wallet.’ ”

Carmelita left, troubled because this time she’d noticed money and a ring in the wallet. What if the owner were someone passing through town, not to return? She realized it wasn’t the restaurant’s responsibility to track someone down.

She went back and her concerns were borne out: The wallet belonged to Daniel Adam Dusenbury of San Antonio, Texas. She wrote down the information and went home to make phone calls.

On her first try, she connected. It was their son’s wallet, the elder Dusenbury on the other end of the line said, and he was a freshman at the University of Redlands. Within the hour, young Dusenbury, who had been visiting Orange County for the day with his roommate, retrieved his wallet.

And, Carmelita learned how her honesty paid off.

Dusenbury was booked to fly home for the holidays. Besides about $20, his wallet contained his credit cards and driver’s license. Without the photo ID, he likely wouldn’t have been allowed on his scheduled flight because of new security procedures.

On Tuesday, Dusenbury, who goes by his middle name of Adam, was at his parent’s home in San Antonio. “I’m very lucky,” he said. “I felt very lucky that someone as nice as her picked it up. I called her Sunday night and thanked her.”

The story has an odd, poignant twist.

Carmelita’s holiday Samaritanism bears an eerie resemblance to something her only other child, John, did the day after Christmas in 1979. Then 14, John Lustig and a friend found a pouch containing $3,780 in the middle of the street. They returned the money and learned it belonged to a shop owner who might have gone out of business had he lost it.

The Times interviewed and photographed young John, his friend and the money’s owner. Carmelita Lustig has kept that yellowed clipping--one of many mementos of her son, who died of AIDS in 1992. He was 26.

The coincidence isn’t lost on Carmelita. Nor was the fact that although her family life has been marred by tragedy, her good deed last week helped unite a family at the holidays.

“In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Is God using me as an angel here?’ Carmelita says. “Because I think he does, to a certain degree. Maybe I was Daniel’s angel for that day. I’d like to think so.”

The next day, Monday, flowers arrived from the Dusenburys. Young Adam has a standing invitation at the Lustig home, where Carmelita says, “It touched me that he was younger than my son. I feel very close to him, and yet I haven’t even met him.”

The same afternoon she found the wallet, Carmelita says, her husband, Paul, came home and said he had a surprise. Even though it was a day off, he’d stopped by the Mercedes-Benz dealership where he works and, lo and behold, had made a sale.

Carmelita could only smile. “I knew then that God had already rewarded me.”

Maybe someone else would have found the wallet and returned it. Maybe not. As for the statistical probability of a mother and son both finding missing valuables the week of holidays, my computer can’t handle that one.

When all is said and done, I guess, it isn’t that remarkable that someone found a wallet and returned it. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

“I was taught to be honest,” she says, “but most of all my dad taught me to be a giver and not a taker.”

And that’s basically the story.

In the end, it’s presented as a Thanksgiving tale, meant to be nothing more than what it is. Even to Carmelita, it isn’t all that complicated.

“It doesn’t pay to keep something that doesn’t belong to you,” says Carmelita, who finds out just before Christmas if her cancer is gone. “It’s not yours, and I don’t see how it could bring any happiness or joy spending someone else’s money. That’s not what life is about.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.