The two postings following this were truncated - I hope this makes it to complete the posting

Subject: Old Ed

(Story sent to me.)

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,
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.

Reference: (Max Lucado, In The Eye of the Storm, pp..221,
225-226)

PS: Eddie started Eastern Airlines.