[caption id="attachment_6070" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sue Joe"]
[/caption]Carol Forsloff - St. Helens, Oregon is one of those picturesque places with many stories to tell, of ash from a volcano of the same name and the small town wonders and glowing green countryside Oregon is known for best, but we can add another and that’s honesty, a policy two restaurants in the area share for sure.
Sue Joe Martin is a diminutive woman with the fresh face of youth, but that fresh face is really a beautiful aura that covers one of a much older woman. At 65 Sue Joe can articulate her ideas with the savoir faire of the best. She and her first husband, both Chinese, moved to Oregon from Canada many years ago, founded a restaurant that has been in the area for 25 years, raised their children and found success. Later Martin lost her husband, Bing, to an assassin’s bullet, an event that put her on the front page of Portland papers as the grieving widow. It was a complex crime of the type that is talked about than disappears as only yesterday’s news, but for a grieving widow holds sorrow that often seems never to end.
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[/caption]But Sue Joe isn’t the kind of person that stays stagnant when grief invades life. Instead she reaches out to help others in need everywhere. Her new husband, Jerry, who stood by her in her dark moments following the loss of her first husband, says, “She would truly give you the shirt off her back. She is a loving, giving person who is always looking for something good to do for others. Indeed she is a wonderful person in every way."
That way was demonstrated one Wednesday morning when a frustrated journalist, who had misplaced a camera at a restaurant near Bing’s the restaurant Sue Joe owns, called to inquire if Sue might know that restaurant address and have a contact number. An incident of a lost camera brought the kindest intervention on the telephone, information about where the other restaurant was located and a good word about it as well.
The lost camera was found at Warren Country Inn, where honesty prevails as well. The camera had been found where the errant journalist in the daze of a day’s long hours had left it. It had been found and taken to the office, where the journalist picked it up the next day. Still, the lost and found story doesn’t end with this.
It might be good for folks to know that most people actually do return lost items. That means honesty is the best policy with folks. That news reinforces the practice itself in St. Helens, but there’s even more to it that shows how trust and honesty itself can lead to relationships that count.
The story is a never-ending tale of how people meet in one place, sometimes not for the purpose thought, as the lovely Sue Joe is now a friend, more than a voice on a telephone, but a person met at dinner, after the camera was recovered from Warren’s Country Inn nearby. Where honesty and kindness exist, good feelings thrive as well. Good feelings lead to trust, and trust to friendship, as happens with us all. The potential tragedy of a lost camera, with its critical camera photos, and the sorrows of a Chinese woman whose emotional pain is drowned in the healing and sharing with others, is one of those timeless tales that all of us must share in a world where disaster news is all the time each day. But in a small town in Oregon it’s the best news and the kind most of us surely want to know where honesty and kindness still prevail. Being instrumental in the return of lost items is one of those acts that can create dimensions of human relationship, reinforcing the fact that honesty really is the best policy.
