It happened every
Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun
resembled
a giant orange and was starting to dip into the blue
ocean.
Old Ed came strolling along the beach to his
favorite pier. Clutched in his
bony hand was a bucket
of shrimp. Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where
it
seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun
is a golden
bronze now.
Everybody's gone, except for
a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the
end of the
pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts... And his bucket of
shrimp.
Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up
in the sky a thousand white
dots come screeching and
squawking, winging their way toward that lanky
frame
standing there on the end of the pier.
Before long,
dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings
fluttering
and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing
shrimp to the hungry birds. As
he does, if you listen
closely, you can hear him say with a smile, 'Thank
you.
Thank you.'
In a few short minutes the bucket is
empty.. But Ed doesn't leave..
He stands there lost in
thought, as though transported to another time and
place..
Invariably, one of the gulls lands on his
sea-bleached,
weather-beaten hat - an old military hat he's
been wearing for years.
When he finally turns around
and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few
of the
birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs,
and
then they, too, fly away. And old Ed quietly makes his
way down to the end
of the beach and on home.
If you
were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the
water,
Ed might seem like 'a funny old duck,' as my dad
used to say. Or, 'a guy
that's a sandwich shy of a picnic,'
as my kids might say. To onlookers, he's
just another old
codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the
seagulls
with a bucket full of shrimp.
To the
onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty.
They
can seem altogether unimportant... Maybe even a lot of
nonsense.
Old folks often do strange things, at least
in the eyes of Boomers and
Busters.
Most of them
would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida .
That's
too bad. They'd do well to know him
better.
His full name: Eddie Rickenbacker. He was a
famous hero back in World War
II. On one of his flying
missions across the Pacific as a civilian
consultant to the
military , he and his seven-member crew went
down.
Miraculously, all of the men survived, crawled out of
their plane, and
climbed into a life raft.
Captain
Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters
of
the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks.
Most of all, they
fought hunger. By the eighth day their
rations ran out. No food. No water.
They were hundreds of
miles from land and no one knew where they were.
They
needed a miracle. That afternoon they had a simple devotional
service
and prayed for a miracle. They tried to nap. Eddie
leaned back and pulled
his military cap over his nose. Time
dragged. All he could hear was the slap
of the waves
against the raft.
Suddenly, Eddie felt something land
on the top of his cap. It was a seagull!
Old Ed
would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his
next
move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the
gull, he managed to
grab it and wring its neck. He tore the
feathers off, and he and his
starving crew made a meal - a
very slight meal for eight men - of it. Then
they used the
intestines for bait. With it, they caught fish, which
gave
them food and more bait... And the cycle continued.
With that simple
survival technique, they were able to
endure the rigors of the sea until
they were found and
rescued. (after 24 days at sea...)
Eddie Rickenbacker
lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never
forgot
the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull. And
he never stopped saying,
'Thank you.'That's why almost
every Friday night he would walk to the end of
the pier
with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of
gratitude.