Shakespeare once said, "No legacy is as rich as honesty." Nahim Alcure lives by these words. At 99, he decided to correct a mistake he made 44 years ago. In 1980, Alcure accidentally took a bath towel from a hotel. When he finally realized his mistake, he knew he had to make it right. In doing so, he left a memorable legacy for the hotel staff.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Olly
The 99-year-old former mayor of Iúna, who served from 1967 to 1971, recalls his stay at the Plaza Hotel Colatina in Espirito Santo, Brazil, in 1980. He was there for his son’s law entrance exams. "I stayed at the hotel for a week and when I went to unpack my suitcase, I discovered that I had taken a towel by mistake. I moved several times over the years and ended up forgetting about it and didn't know where it was. But when it reappeared, I made a point of returning it," Nahim told the Brazilian publication GI.
Unaware of the towel tucked in his suitcase, Nahim returned home. His employees, thinking it was his, stored it somewhere in his large residence. It wasn't until March 2024 that he found the towel and decided to return it. While in Guarapari, he planned his trip to Colatina to fulfill this wish, according to A Gazeta.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | rodolphozanardo
In April, while at his son Nahim Alcure Junior's house, Nahim shared his plan. Together with his son and daughter-in-law, they embarked on a 180-kilometer, roughly 111 miles, journey to the hotel. “We decided to change the itinerary from Guarapari to Iuna and walked more than 180 km to fulfill this desire of the man who reached 99 years old with a strong desire to live, and to live doing the right thing, no matter how small it may be for some,” said Nahim Alcure Junior.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | cottonbro
In the hotel, the trio was greeted with "surprise and gratitude." Remembering that moment, Nahim recalled, “The girl was very surprised and immediately wanted to take a portrait with me. They asked why I kept the towel for so long, and why I wanted to return it to the hotel. I replied that honesty is not a virtue, it’s a duty!”
Nahim said returning the towel lifted a weight off his shoulders. “The hotel employee said that she thought the act was important, thanked me, and made a point of taking a picture," he added. "They said that they don't even use those towels anymore. They are going to put it in a frame and hang it on the wall,"
Representative Image Source: Pexels | castorlystock
The hotel’s owner, Maria Zelurze, who had decided to frame the towel, said that Nahim "was excited" when he went to return the towel. "He returned the towel and I put it in a frame. He was bothered by having kept the towel and decided to come. He was all excited. He took it by mistake, he didn't do it on purpose, he is an honest person and that is very rare.”
She added that it is uncommon for people to return the items they purloin, mistakenly or otherwise, from the hotel. “Here, from time to time, people take towels, bedspreads, but they don't return them,” she said, adding, “Returning something had never happened before.”
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.