National Night Out, with Ice Cream

Yesterday, August 5, was National Night Out, and we observed it on Wessyngton Road like we have for the last couple of years with ice cream on the grounds at Morningside Presbyterian Church.  At this point it is a nearly self-organizing event.  A query via Facebook, does anyone have any other ideas?  None proposed.  Is 8 p.m. too late?  Yes, given that school will have started the day before, 7 is better.  A sign up sheet gets essentials first -- bowls, spoons, and napkins -- and after that anyone else who asks gets told to bring ice cream.

Lynsley got us on the church calendar, and I filled out the on line registration for our event with the National Association of Town Watch.  I emailed Major Hobbes to invite someone from Zone 2 of the Atlanta Police Department to come by.  Later I saw a different contact for APD, and I emailed her too.  After that, there wasn't much else to do until yesterday afternoon.  Since the picnic tables aren't there any more, just south of the playground, I put a folding table in the car along with a table cloth and a couple of trash bags.

Late in the afternoon I took the dog for a walk.  He's doing better every day on a leash; I don't know if it's the harness (we got the one that is the correct size on Monday) or the fluoxetine or both, but he's definitely doing better.  But I didn't take my cell phone with me, and it wasn't until I was about to drive over to the church that I saw that I had several missed calls from the same unrecognized number.  So I called back, and after I identified myself, the man who answered asked if I'd called for a fire truck.

My initial response was "no," thinking that he meant a 911-call-that-the-house-was-on-fire kind of calling for a fire truck.  I certainly hadn't done that.  But after initially saying no, I realized that this might be a National Night Out-kind of request for a fire truck, so I told him that we were having a National Night Out event at Morningside Presbyterian at 7 p.m., and we'd be delighted if the guys could come with the truck, and if they could, we'd feed them ice cream.  It turned out there had been a major miscommunication (I'm not sure on who's part, since they only part of city government I'd contacted was APD) and they had sent the truck out to our event at 5 p.m.  I reiterated that our event was at 7 p.m. and he said something about the church being on Piedmont, across from Fat Matt's.  I told him no, that we were at Morningside Presbyterian, and that the church on Piedmont was Morningside Baptist (that's what I said but the church across the street from Fat Matt's might actually be Rock Springs Presbyterian.  Either way, it wasn't Morningside Presbyterian.)  After we got that straightened out, he said he wasn't sure they could come, that they'd had to respond to a house fire earlier, and I said I certainly understood but if they could come they'd be welcome.

So we didn't get a fire truck but we had plenty of ice cream, our neighbor Linda's homemade cookies, and a good number of neighbors over the course of the evening.

Scott's parents, visiting from Florida, came as did one of our new neighbors who had just moved in.

The Atlanta Police Department was well-represented, and even without the fire truck we had plenty of guests.  Major Hobbes was there, along with several other police officers.  Anna Crist from the Mayor's Office of Constituent Services came too, and so did Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Harlow of the Fulton County District Attorney's office. 

So it was another successful National Night Out on Wessyngton Road.  But one of the best parts of the evening was watching the three small boys on bicycles going up and down the street.  One of the boys was from the family that just moved in; he was riding his bike with the boys who live next door.

That's my street.