More Good News
MiscDoctor / Fire / Thanksgiving / wedding ring5 Comments
Good news? I’ll keep looking for it.
Free Thanksgiving: Scott Macaulay offers dinner to all who RSVP – Wow I get nervous just cooking for family.
For his first Thanksgiving alone in 1985, Scott Macaulay was thinking that he would have to heat up a frozen turkey dinner and turn on a football game to stifle the silence in his apartment near Boston.
With his parents recently divorced and “nobody talking to anybody,” he said, “I was looking at a pretty rotten Thanksgiving. And I absolutely hate to eat alone.”
Then Macaulay, a divorced vacuum cleaner repairman, had an idea: What if he took out an ad in his hometown paper, the Melrose Free Press, and invited 12 strangers to join him for Thanksgiving dinner? It seemed like a manageable number to host at the First Baptist Church he attended — and, yeah, it was a little crazy, but it had to be better than being lonely.
Well, those original 12 have morphed over 33 years to an average of 60-100 a year.
He’s made dozens of friends and an equal number of memories.
“There was a guy one year who’d just lost his wife,” he said. “And after dinner, he put on her old apron and helped me to do the dishes.”
One year, he said, an elderly woman paid $200 for an ambulance to drive her to the church from her nursing home. She arrived decked out in fancy clothes and told Macaulay she hadn’t been out in seven years. She cried when dinner was over.
Last year, two people showed up with service dogs.
Geoff Shanklin, 65, who lives alone and has attended every dinner since the tradition began, said he watches in admiration each year when Macaulay makes the dinner happen.
“He prepares it all and we bring ourselves,” Shanklin said. “He really enjoys passing it on to lonely people in Melrose. For people like me with nowhere to go, Scott is family.”
Man Finds Wife’s Wedding Ring in California Wildfire Home Debris – A few months ago, I featured a story about a husband and wife who went back to their destroyed home to look for her wedding ring and that once they found it, he dropped to his knee and proposed again. Here’s another version.
Paradise resident Jake Olsen found his wife’s wedding ring—completely intact—among the debris of his destroyed home, after his wife told him she had left it on the kitchen counter when they evacuated, FOX affiliate KTVU reports.
“It’s just amazing,” Olsen, a conservation officer with the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in an Inside Edition video. “I just didn’t think we were going to find [the ring], but we had to try.”“There used to be a countertop here with the sink,” he added. “She said that she had left it here…and it was there. It’s just a miracle.”
The family has set up a gofundme page but it’s not all for them. The Olsen family plus five other relatives have all lost their houses in the fire.
A New York doctor and a runner from Minnesota reunite after he saved her when she had a heart attack during the NYC Marathon – Talk about good timing.
On November 4th, more than 52,000 people from around the world came shoulder-to-shoulder to run the New York City Marathon. Two of those runners came together at mile 16 that day and changed each others’ lives forever.
After running over the Queensborough Bridge into Manhattan, Elfering felt something wasn’t quite right. “I just remember thinking, ‘I’m a little warm, but we’re coming off the bridge,'” Elfering told CBS News. “I remember seeing the people, like, ‘Oh, we’re back in and they’re going to cheer me on.’ Then I don’t remember anything.”
Elfering fell to the ground — she was having a heart attack. Her friend and running partner, Victoria, who had traveled to New York to run the race with her, panicked.
That’s when Dr. Ted Strange fatefully ran by.
After immediately starting CPR, he called for a defibrillator. That’s when emergency response personnel arrived and whisked Elfering off to a hospital. Not knowing each others’ names, the two didn’t think they’d ever meet up but a nurse taking care of her, who knew Dr. Strange, heard her story and put the clues together that allowed them to meet up.
Thanks again for sharing feel good stories today. All wonderful stories.
I am really enjoying these upbeat stories. Thank you!
Thank you, Jayne. The Macaulay story was particularly heartwarming.
And Dr. Strange! I love these stories. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing these stories. Much appreciated.