Fired Up! at Fire Station No. 19

This morning Iain ran the 4th Annual Fired Up 5K race. Registration was set up inside Fire Station No. 19, and the fire truck was outside. I think a few of the fire fighters ran in the race, but most of them were standing around outside. There were also several volunteers from the Greenbriar Lions Club there, middle-aged African-American men and women, wearing yellow vests covered with pins and patches, helping people get in the right line during registration, staffing the finish line, helping with different tasks. I asked them where they met, and they said they met on Thursdays at Greenbriar. I told them that my father had been a Lion for many many years, and they asked if I'd ever been to a Lions Club meeting. I said I had and they smiled and invited me to visit their club. They make the rounds of community events, it sounded like - they told me what event they were working at next weekend, but I don't remember. This event supports scholarships for kids attending Atlanta Public Schools. Fire fighters - community volunteers - scholarships for kids to go to college - seems like a winner for the neighborhood.

This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)

Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.

I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.

Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.