Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, I was privileged to help serve almost 200 seniors lunch at a church in a mid-sized Texas town. I say privileged because I am a senior - with the health, driving abilities and resources to be of service to those in my community. I call it "being on the right side of the bingo card."
We serve the seniors juice and coffee, then they play bingo. Afterwards we were all entertained by a wonderful performer who took us on a trip to Broadway. With hats and wraps she sang her way through many Broadway musicals, finishing up with a military salute and a medley of tribute to America songs. She was fantastic and had everyone on their feet waving their flags.
Then a salute to 9/11 was presented via video on something I had never seen before - the boat lift. We all know Manhattan is an island and saw many people trudging across the bridges that were closed to traffic just as the subways and trains were.
Enter the call by the Coast Guard for any and all available boats. Ferries, tugboats, private boats, party boats, sightseeing boats, anything that would float filled the New York harbor in numbers never seen before. A half million people were evacuated via water in 9 hours. By comparison 339,000 were evacuated at Dunkirk over 9 days. This remains the biggest water evacuation in history. There was not a dry eye at the end.
Normally we all cook many pans of the same thing(s) to feed the crowd but today was special and lunch was catered by Chik Fil A.
After lunch many folks stopped to thank us all for the fun and a memorable day.
With many hands, clean up was quick and I was home in short order.
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1 comment:
Donna I would have loved to have seen that video, and you are right, we have never heard of this evacuation. Hope you and Ted are getting settled in. Things are going okay here - we are getting used to keeping the "little one" and the change it makes in our schedule.
Hugs -
Carol
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