A Message In A Bottle - but hey we know the guy in the picture!

0:02 I mean a year. I'm Johnny Mack with five good news stories. Let's start off the new year. We look at long weekends. We've got a lot of them this year, the way the calendar fell. Now the bad news. You're in the middle of one of them right now, New Year's weekend, but another one coming up January seventeenth, weekend of Martin Luther King Junior's birthday. Then in February we've got President's Day, March and April's a little thin long weekend for Memorial Day at the end of May, and then a few weeks later the juneteenth and National Independence Day. That'll be on Monday, June nineteenth, part of that weekend, then two weeks later Tuesday July fourth. Tuesday July fourth is awesome because then everybody get off Monday July third. That's a nice four day weekend. We got to figure out August somehow, Labor Day weekend at the beginning of September. Some people get Columbus Day off. I don't, but I hope you do. That's October ninth this year Veterans Day again, one of those that depends what your job is.

0:51 That's November tenth, Thanksgiving a nice four day weekend, and then, of course Christmas this year will be on a Monday, so at least get three day weekends out of that, all right. In the news, a stranger has raised one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to help an eighty two year old Walmart worker payoff medical bills. Elizabeth Rizzo saw an eighty two year old woman holding a cane and working at a Walmart in Arizona. She wondered why she was still working. Turned out that Carmen Kelly was working to pay off about ten thousand dollars in medical debt only had fifty dollars in her bank account. Elizabeth Rizzo made a TikTok video about her situation. That video went viral. It's been viewed more than fifteen million times. To go fund me raisers she created and shared where her followers has raised more than one hundred and twenty nine thousand dollars for the eighty two year old. Rizzo tells today dot Com.

1:37 I was surprised at the amount we were able to fund raise. I was really shocked, But I believe in the goodness of people, and I believe if you touch their heart in some way they'll come together. Rizzo has continued to record her interactions with Kelly and shares them with the TikTok community. Kelly told Rizzo during one of the videos, there isn't enough words to tell you how I feel. It isn't just about me. It's the meaning of all this and what I really feel. It's about that joy. They live twenty minutes from each other and now good friends. Rizzle says she sees Kelly like your own grandmother. Kelly's still working at the Walmart because she loves her job, but she does plan to cut back the hours. A man was reunited with his mom forty four years after she thought that he died. Listen to this. Two weeks after he was born in Jordan with some Mohammed got sick.

2:20 His Jordanian father and Egyptian's mother relationship was falling apart. His father told the mother that the baby died in the hospital. The couple divorced. Mohammed's mother returned to Egypt's capital. When Mohammed grew up, he started looking for his mother. He didn't know if she was dead or alive. All he had was her name from his birth certificate in a vague idea of where she had lived in Cairo decades ago. He had traveled to Egypt a few times hoping to find her, but that failed. She used to live in a place in Cairo that was destroyed by an earthquake in ninety two. Finding someone, especially an older person, unlikely to be on social media in a country more than a hundred million people is no small feat. I only knew for sure that she was alive about four years ago when the lawyers told me they couldn't find a death certificate for her. Then and aunt and Jordan found some photos of Mohammed's mother. She posted them on social media. One of her friends contacted an Egypt based Facebook group called Missing Children. Mohammed's story was posted on the Facebook group's page with a photo of his mother in a caption reading, your son is alive and looking for you. Within twenty four hours, Mohammed's mother was located through the page. He flew to Cairo the next day.

3:20 She met him at the airport. He said to his mother, you thought I was dead. She said, they told me so. He said, I'm sorry, I've been looking for you for twenty years. Angela Cole is about to become an internationally published author. She's eighty nine. She started writing the book when she was twelve. To the math, that's seventy seven years ago. She has been working on the novel titled La Familia for most of her life, and according to her grandchildren, the contents of the story had been around for as long as they can remember. It was mostly on hundreds of scrap pieces of paper. Angela's granddaughter, Heidi, became determined to organize her grandma's work into a fully fleshed book. La Familia tells the love story of Angela's mother and father and the life they lived in Egypt. Angela said, if these stories were not written down or narrated to others, they would simply be washed away, like a grain of sand taken away by a wave. Growing up, I was mesmerized by them, and I started to write them down. I always love when somebody tells me a story and I write it down. Whether I like it or not doesn't matter. It's a story real people. Granddaughter, Heidi, who's thirty, got working and has secured a publisher after months of research, so the book will be coming out.

4:17 A woman in Fort Myers was cleaning up the beach and found a message in a bottle. Kathy Grace said, I started off kind of blue that day because I lost my husband like seven months ago and it was his birthday. She decided to participate in a beach clean up, hoping to feel a little better. She's about to wrap it up. She noticed one more bottle to pick it up, and then she saw the letter inside of it. She opened it and sent a picture of it to her children and received a response from her son, Michael. Michael was like, you're not going to believe this, but the dude in the bottle and I went to college together. We both worked at DHL. Here's a picture of us in California last year. On the beach. Grace said, how could it be all the millions of people that have been on board this beach since it was buried. I find it within minutes. We know who it is. Roman, who wrote the letter, said, I'm grateful that Mi, because mom didn't just you know, throw away the bottle. Actually had a little curiosity in her, you know, open the bottle and read the note. I was more grateful for that because, you know, typical volunteer clean up the beach, help and now could just thrown it away and moved on with their day.

5:10 Fort Myers is a place we always used to go down for many years just to have that bottle come back to us and recreate some of those Fort Myers memories. It was a bright spot in by day and I kind of want to go back home now and watch the home videos again. That's your good news for today. You have a great day.