I love the Great Colorado Payback for one reason, and it’s not because I ever get anything back. No long-lost relative left me $50,000 worth of bonds in a safety deposit box and forgot to mention it. No bank finally drilled into an abandoned safety deposit box to find 20 diamond rings, one of them a 6.2-carat canary-yellow diamond with my name on it.
I’d settle for enough to cover lunch, but, no, the banks turn over the abandoned contents to the state Unclaimed Property Division, the state publishes a list and my name appears nowhere on it.
This is the most wonderful time of the year because I can talk my way into the vault in the state treasurer’s office. Honestly, from the inside it looks more like a storage closet, all cardboard boxes, but it is still something to walk past that 7-ton Herring-Hall-Marvin safe door and know I am entering a portal that holds thousands of clues to thousands of lives. Besides, the 25-pound silver bars in a box at my feet are the closest I will ever come to storybook treasure, to the heavy glint and fairy-dust sparkle of overflowing wooden chests.
I am aware of the admonishment against coveting my neighbor’s property. But surely there must be an exception for unclaimed property. A couple years ago, Ann McKee, the safe deposit manager for the division, displayed before me jewelry so beautiful and unique, I felt faint.
In that moment, I was hooked. Not simply by the splendor, but by the mystery. The who and what and when, and, most of all, the how and why something so valuable could end up abandoned.
In the absence of knowing, the mind takes the smallest of clues and weaves together a life.
That particular story had a happy ending. We found the box’s owner. She was living in Taiwan under her maiden name. After she moved, her bank closed, merged. She lost track of it and it lost track of her. When she came to claim her heirlooms, she stood in the treasurer’s office and cried.
Treasure is, of course, a subjective term. Most of the abandoned boxes have junk in them and it gets thrown away. Buttons, grocery lists, tokens, matchbooks, all of which at one time may have had some value as talismans. That Coney Island token means nothing to anyone but the person who holds it and remembers a summer that smelled like cotton candy. See what I mean? It’s irresistible, the desire to fill in the blanks.
It’s the big-ticket items that capture the public imagination. The division just tracked down a man whose mother bought him Colorado municipal bonds in the mid-’80s. He thought she had lost them. State Treasurer Cary Kennedy left him a message on Monday, said she had some good news, asked him to call her back. When he does, he’ll learn he has a quarter of a million dollars waiting for him.
On Monday, McKee and the director of the division, Patty White, pull out a box they’ve had for a while now. It was reported abandoned in 1990. The clues are few. A woman’s name. A Denver bank. Nothing else.
Her box held nothing but albums full of stamps. Thousands of them. From Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Greenland. She had a whole album devoted to Vatican stamps. Paper envelopes hold sheets of beautiful commemorative stamps honoring past presidents, universities, states, religious freedom, the first man on the moon, the National Education Association, the newspaper boy.
It’s the letters they want me to see. White says keeping them was one of those tough calls, but, she says, “you know they would be important to someone.”
“It looks like the bank lost track of the owner in 1995,” McKee says. There are two letters, both dated 1988. Each has its own envelope, and each envelope has a girl’s name upon it with the date it is to be opened. One is 1999, the other in 2002 — when each of the girls turns 18. The letters are from their father.
He tells them how much he loves and misses them. He explains why he left, his own lack of responsibility, his struggle with alcoholism.
“I don’t know if I could ever tell you properly in words, spoken or written, how much you mean to me, little girl,” he writes to his eldest daughter, who would have been 7 years old then. “When you have your own children you will understand. I feel you deeply inside me even from 1,000 miles away. One thing I have discovered is that children come with two umbilical cords. The physical one is cut at birth; the emotional one is never cut. Never.”
I read enough to understand what he is trying to say and then stop. We wonder if he’s still alive. If he managed to stay sober. If he remained a part of his daughters’ lives. We wonder if he would want these letters.
We can’t help but think that, as hard as they are to read, his daughters would because sometimes what is lost proves to be irreplaceable.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
