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CHICAGO (AP) – Anyone who has left a hat on the Chicago Transit Authority train knows that whatever leaves the station without its owner often disappears forever.
Except, apparently, a $ 22,000 gold and silver flute.
Donald Rabin is once again holding – and playing – the flute left to him by his grandmother that he forgot in a train seat when he jumped last week in the Logan Square neighborhood.
“I’m grateful to have the flute in my hands, to be able to make music again and make people smile,” said Rabin, a 23-year-old flutist in Boston.
Rabin was taking a Blue Line train from O’Hare International Airport during a stopover before his return to Berklee College of Music in Boston. When he came down, he realized he had left his flute behind.
He said he traveled by train for hours hoping to find the flute. When it was empty, he reported the disappearance of the instrument to the police and went to social media to tell people what happened.
According to the Chicago Tribune, a CNN reporter told Rabin when he was about to fly out of Chicago that there was a Facebook comment about the flute appearing in a pawn shop, that a homeless person found it and used it as collateral for a $ 550 loan.
The pawnshop owner, Gabe Cocanate, was holding the flute, trying to determine if it was as valuable as it looked, when he and his wife saw the story of the missing flute on the news.
So when the homeless man came back to the store, “I said, ‘Listen, man, it’s on all the news. It’s not your flute, ‘”Coconate told the Chicago Sun-Times.
The police took the flute and contacted Rabin, who flew back to Chicago this week, retrieved it and gave the officers a brief concert.
Rabin knew the chances of seeing something so valuable again. Still, he said, “For some reason, I knew in my heart and soul that she would be found. I knew that my grandmother would never leave me. “