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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 would come, making his way along the beach to his favorite
pier. Clutched in his bony hand was always a bucket of shrimp.
Ed would walk out to the end of the pier where it seemed he almost had the world to himself. The glow of the sun would be a golden bronze by then. Everybody had gone except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier Ed would be all alone with his thoughts....and his bucket of shrimp.
Before long, however, he would no longer be alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots would come, screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky, bent and frail frame standing there on the end of the pier. Before long dozens of seagulls would have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly.
Ed would stand there, tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he did, if you could listen closely, you would hear him say with a smile, "Thank you. Thank you."
In a few short minutes the bucket would be empty. But Ed would not leave. He always stood there, lost in thought, as though transported to another world and time...his mind racing backwards to a memory long since passed...until, invariably, one of the gulls would land on his sea-bleached, weather-beaten hat - an old military hat he'd been wearing for years.
Soon he would turn and began to shuffle back toward the beach. A few of the birds would hop along the pier with him until he finally made it to the stairs, and then they, too, would leave him in peace with his memories and fly away...and old Ed would quietly make his way down to the end of the beach and on to his lonely 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 would probably be 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 here 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 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 the sharks. Most of all they fought the hunger and their feelings of hopelessness. 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.
Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull. He never stopped praising God 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.
PS: Eddie was also an Ace in WW I and started Eastern Airlines back in the 30's
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