Sometimes it seems that it gets harder each year to do this meal. Volunteers aren’t volunteering like they used to, cooks are harder to find, there’s more people who need us each year, and every year there’s people who aren’t around any more to help. I often don’t know the names and faces of people who helped last year who aren’t there the next; the over one hundred people who flood Cedar Hill on Thanksgiving are just a flood of faces of people I should know but often don’t, and often the people who aren’t with us to cook are people I’ve never met and may have not heard of.

Most years there’s also someone not around whom I do notice, especially when it’s somebody who helped so much that it’s hard to imagine doing this event without them, Ann Huntsman is one who immediately comes to mind. Yet we still go on and the event happens, even without them, proving that nobody is indepensible. So I just smile every year when somebody from Cedar Hill calls and says that they couldn’t do it without me because I’ve thought that about other people, yet we have, we did and the meal goes on.

This year is different. The two people we’re doing without are two people who are very difficult to do without. Their jobs can and will get done, but facing the meal without them makes me want to not even have the meal this year, but they wouldn’t allow that and would probably come back to haunt me if I tried to use my grief for them as an excuse to quit.

Foy Harrison was everywhere and known by everybody. He delighted in things like the Thanksgiving meal and was my annual advisor on quantities and cooking. He would begin calling me in late August or early September to find out what I needed for the meal and he’d call and find the best prices on the ham or turkey, depending on what we were serving that year. Until last year he’d spend the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving at Trinity after he got off work, slicing and supervising the slicing of the meat, and he’d be at the church by 5:30 on Thanksgiving morning to cook the meat before heading off to cook all day at the Country Club. His was a never ending wellspring of advice, encouragement, support and all-around cheerfulness. I never left his home not knowing more and feeling better than when I arrived.

Just about everything I know about organizing an event I learned from David Johnson. He had a knack for organizing, conceptualizing, visualizing, anything that ended in “izing” he was a master of. I saw him more than I did Foy because it seems we were always working together on something for church. He was my father’s boyhood and adult best friend and neighbor, my daughter’s godfather, the best man at my mother’s second wedding; he was wherever he was needed. He organized the parking plan at Cedar Hill; he did the shopping at Modern Meats for our supplies; he oversaw the moving of the steam tables and warming oven from Hardins Chapel to Cedar Hill; he took charge of the crock pots and warming pans for the extra food that morning; he encouraged others to participate; as in so much of my life, he was always there wherever and whenever I needed him.

David’s and Foy’s pictures sit next to my father’s on the shelf behind my desk at work, always watching over my back, smiling at me, reminding me to always do my best, even when I get discouraged and tired and want to quit and go home. I don’t know which six or seven people will take their place this year, but somebody will, so we’ll go on and have a wonderful meal and feed a lot of people and pass out a lot of literature. I don’t really feel like it and I really don’t want to, but it’s what they would expect of me and what they would want me to do, so how could I do anything else?