Child's good deed brings joy to Chesapeake girl

CHESAPEAKE

As the Armstrong family stepped out of the DMV office in Suffolk earlier this month, 4½-year-old Morgan couldn’t have been prouder.

In her little hands she clasped her first official ID card.

There was her picture and her full name, Morgan Taylor Armstrong.

Her brother, Sterling, 6, had also gotten his ID made that day, March 5. He stuck it in an old wallet he had. But his sister had nothing to hold hers, their mother said Sunday.

So, in an act perhaps uncharacteristic of young siblings, the boy loaned her his other wallet, a cherished Spider Man wallet, a gift from his grandfather, “Pop-pop.”

And all was good – for a few hours, anyway.

That is until Morgan and her brother went to show off their new IDs to a police officer at a restaurant and she found that hers, and the Spidey wallet, were gone.

The family feared “it would be lost forever,” their mother Chrissy Armstrong, 38, said Sunday.

The family retraced their steps to the Hampton Bass Pro Shop, where they knew she had last had it.

“Morgan had been holding onto that thing so tight, it was amazing she was able to lose it,” Armstrong said. But they suspect that when the girl tucked her coat under her arm, the wallet must have fallen from it.

That was almost three weeks – and many tears – ago.

By this past week, the loss was being forgotten.

Until Thursday, however, when a package showed up in the mail and one young child’s empathy made two others joyous.

The envelope, addressed to Morgan, had a Newport News address. Inside was the wallet, the lost ID and even the single penny Morgan had put in with it.

And there was a note.

“Miss Morgan: My daughter Savannah found your wallet at Bass Pro shop in Hampton, Va . She was sad that you lost it, so we mailed it to you. We know you missed it.”

It was signed simply, “Erica Press.”

“Everything was just how she had left it,” Chrissy Armstrong said. “We were all just so amazed. These days, most people would have found it and said, ‘Oh, a new wallet for me.’”

A return letter will be going in the mail Monday morning. The family sat down and finished composing it Sunday afternoon. “My little girl is just learning how to write,” Armstrong said. “My little boy is in kindergarten. But they both sat down and wrote thank you’s too.”

And there are gifts.

“We got her a little wallet with hearts on it and a purse with little princesses on it,” Armstrong said.

They got a similar one for Morgan. It now holds her ID.

There also was a lesson to be taught.

The childrens’ father, Jason Armstrong, 35, a Dominion Power employee, sat them down Sunday to talk about life, reality and doing the right thing.

“He explained to my little girl that she was extremely lucky,” Armstrong said, “that this is not something she should expect if she loses anything else.”

At the same time, both youngsters were told that this was exactly what they should do if they ever find anything belonging to someone else.

“I really do feel like it is something they will do,’’ mother Armstrong said.

The experience “lets me know that there are still good people in this world and that the right thing is still being instilled in our youth,” Armstrong said.

As for the penny, there are no special plans, Armstrong said. “She’ll probably just stick it in her pig.”

For safe keeping.

Steve Stone, (757) 446-2309/2319, steve.stone@pilotonline.com