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

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I mean a year. I'm Johnny
Mack with five good news stories. Let's

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start off the new year. We
look at long weekends. We've got a

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lot of them this year, the
way the calendar fell. Now the bad

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news. You're in the middle of
one of them right now, New Year's

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weekend, but another one coming up
January seventeenth, weekend of Martin Luther King

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Junior's birthday. Then in February we've
got President's Day, March and April's a

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little thin long weekend for Memorial Day
at the end of May, and then

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a few weeks later the juneteenth and
National Independence Day. That'll be on Monday,

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June nineteenth, part of that weekend, then two weeks later Tuesday July

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fourth. Tuesday July fourth is awesome
because then everybody get off Monday July third.

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That's a nice four day weekend.
We got to figure out August somehow,

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Labor Day weekend at the beginning of
September. Some people get Columbus Day

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off. I don't, but I
hope you do. That's October ninth this

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year Veterans Day again, one of
those that depends what your job is.

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That's November tenth, Thanksgiving a nice
four day weekend, and then, of

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course Christmas this year will be on
a Monday, so at least get three

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day weekends out of that, all
right. In the news, a stranger

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has raised one hundred and twenty thousand
dollars to help an eighty two year old

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Walmart worker payoff medical bills. Elizabeth
Rizzo saw an eighty two year old woman

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holding a cane and working at a
Walmart in Arizona. She wondered why she

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was still working. Turned out that
Carmen Kelly was working to pay off about

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ten thousand dollars in medical debt only
had fifty dollars in her bank account.

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Elizabeth Rizzo made a TikTok video about
her situation. That video went viral.

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It's been viewed more than fifteen million
times. To go fund me raisers she

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created and shared where her followers has
raised more than one hundred and twenty nine

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thousand dollars for the eighty two year
old. Rizzo tells today dot Com.

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I was surprised at the amount we
were able to fund raise. I was

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really shocked, But I believe in
the goodness of people, and I believe

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if you touch their heart in some
way they'll come together. Rizzo has continued

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to record her interactions with Kelly and
shares them with the TikTok community. Kelly

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told Rizzo during one of the videos, there isn't enough words to tell you

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how I feel. It isn't just
about me. It's the meaning of all

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this and what I really feel.
It's about that joy. They live twenty

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minutes from each other and now good
friends. Rizzle says she sees Kelly like

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your own grandmother. Kelly's still working
at the Walmart because she loves her job,

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but she does plan to cut back
the hours. A man was reunited

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with his mom forty four years after
she thought that he died. Listen to

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this. Two weeks after he was
born in Jordan with some Mohammed got sick.

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His Jordanian father and Egyptian's mother relationship
was falling apart. His father told

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the mother that the baby died in
the hospital. The couple divorced. Mohammed's

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mother returned to Egypt's capital. When
Mohammed grew up, he started looking for

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his mother. He didn't know if
she was dead or alive. All he

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had was her name from his birth
certificate in a vague idea of where she

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had lived in Cairo decades ago.
He had traveled to Egypt a few times

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hoping to find her, but that
failed. She used to live in a

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place in Cairo that was destroyed by
an earthquake in ninety two. Finding someone,

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especially an older person, unlikely to
be on social media in a country

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more than a hundred million people is
no small feat. I only knew for

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sure that she was alive about four
years ago when the lawyers told me they

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couldn't find a death certificate for her. Then and aunt and Jordan found some

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photos of Mohammed's mother. She posted
them on social media. One of her

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friends contacted an Egypt based Facebook group
called Missing Children. Mohammed's story was posted

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on the Facebook group's page with a
photo of his mother in a caption reading,

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your son is alive and looking for
you. Within twenty four hours,

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Mohammed's mother was located through the page. He flew to Cairo the next day.

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She met him at the airport.
He said to his mother, you

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thought I was dead. She said, they told me so. He said,

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I'm sorry, I've been looking for
you for twenty years. Angela Cole

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is about to become an internationally published
author. She's eighty nine. She started

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writing the book when she was twelve. To the math, that's seventy seven

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years ago. She has been working
on the novel titled La Familia for most

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of her life, and according to
her grandchildren, the contents of the story

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had been around for as long as
they can remember. It was mostly on

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hundreds of scrap pieces of paper.
Angela's granddaughter, Heidi, became determined to

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organize her grandma's work into a fully
fleshed book. La Familia tells the love

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story of Angela's mother and father and
the life they lived in Egypt. Angela

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said, if these stories were not
written down or narrated to others, they

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would simply be washed away, like
a grain of sand taken away by a

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wave. Growing up, I was
mesmerized by them, and I started to

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write them down. I always love
when somebody tells me a story and I

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write it down. Whether I like
it or not doesn't matter. It's a

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story real people. Granddaughter, Heidi, who's thirty, got working and has

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secured a publisher after months of research, so the book will be coming out.

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A woman in Fort Myers was cleaning
up the beach and found a message

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in a bottle. Kathy Grace said, I started off kind of blue that

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day because I lost my husband like
seven months ago and it was his birthday.

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She decided to participate in a beach
clean up, hoping to feel a

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little better. She's about to wrap
it up. She noticed one more bottle

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to pick it up, and then
she saw the letter inside of it.

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She opened it and sent a picture
of it to her children and received a

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response from her son, Michael.
Michael was like, you're not going to

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believe this, but the dude in
the bottle and I went to college together.

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We both worked at DHL. Here's
a picture of us in California last

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year. On the beach. Grace
said, how could it be all the

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millions of people that have been on
board this beach since it was buried.

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I find it within minutes. We
know who it is. Roman, who

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wrote the letter, said, I'm
grateful that Mi, because mom didn't just

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you know, throw away the bottle. Actually had a little curiosity in her,

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you know, open the bottle and
read the note. I was more

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grateful for that because, you know, typical volunteer clean up the beach,

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help and now could just thrown it
away and moved on with their day.

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Fort Myers is a place we always
used to go down for many years just

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to have that bottle come back to
us and recreate some of those Fort Myers

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memories. It was a bright spot
in by day and I kind of want

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to go back home now and watch
the home videos again. That's your good

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news for today. You have a
great day.