CHICAGO (AP) – Anyone who has even left a hat on a Chicago Transit Authority train knows that anything that leaves the station without its owner is often gone forever.
Except apparently a $ 22,000 gold and silver flute.
Donald Rabin again holds – and plays – the whistle his grandmother left him that he forgot on a train seat when he jumped into the Logan Square neighborhood last week.
“I’m just grateful to have the flute in my hand, to be able to make music again and make people smile,” said Rabin, a 23-year-old Boston flautist.
Rabin was riding a Blue Line train from O’Hare International Airport on a layover before returning to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. When he got out, he realized he’d left his flute behind.
He said he spent hours on the train hoping to find the whistle. When it became empty, he reported the missing instrument to the police and took to social media to tell people what had happened.
According to the Chicago Tribune, a CNN reporter told Rabin as he was about to fly out of Chicago that there was a comment on Facebook about the whistle appearing in a pawn shop that a homeless person had found him and used it as collateral for a loan from $ 550.
The owner of the pawnshop, Gabe Cocanate, was holding the whistle and trying to determine if it was as valuable as it looked when he and his wife saw the story of the missing whistle on the news.
So when the homeless man returned to the store, “I’m going,” Listen man, it’s been all over the news. It’s not your flute, ” Coconate told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Police picked up the whistle and contacted Rabin, who flew back to Chicago this week, picked it up and treated agents for a brief concert.
Rabin knew the chances he would ever see something so valuable again. And yet he said, “For some reason I knew in my heart and soul that it would be found. I knew my grandmother would never leave me. “