Celebration of the Heart

Did you get your invitation? “The Celebration of the Heart is by invitation only.” That’s the message given to early birds by the outsourced call center at the 800 number we give out for reservations. Best not to be too scrupulous about literal truth; if you got our newsletter, that was your invitation. Members also got a postcard inviting them. But we eventually got the call center to stop saying it was by invitation only.

Bad weather seems to be a tradition for the Celebration of the Heart. This year it was rain. But we had a good showing anyway, 117 according to a quick count by our defiantly aging Vice President, visiting chairman and Master of Ceremonies Len Talalai.

For dinner we had a choice of chicken and fish - as Len warned us, we had to choose, not sample both, so we don’t run out of food, though second helpings could could be had after everyone had a first. As usual, Len called the tables to the buffet line to avoid a crush - but this time he took the curse off the high numbered tables by calling table 1 and table 13 together and working toward table 7. Next year, will he take the curse off the middle tables? Will our guests try to choose the table numbers they think will be called first? Will Len fake them out? Game theory suggests that he pull the table numbers out of a hat.

Sadly, one consequence of the scheduling mixup mentioned in the President’s Message on page 1 was that we lost our live music. When we thought the event would have to be rescheduled we called off the musicians, and by the next day some of them had made other arrangements and we couldn’t get them back. It would have been like herding cats. (Cool cats?) So we had the usual recorded music - thanks to Tony Talalai (Len’s son).

After dinner, and after everybody had a numbered ticket, Len had a few things to say before the drawing for the door prizes began. “Welcome to the miracle of the year,” he said. “Many of you don’t know: as of seven o’clock last night, this party was canceled.” You read about that in Bill Ryan’s message on page 1. Len went on to thank Anita (who watches over the front office at cardiac rehab) for helping get the Celebration back on the calendar. Len also had a few things to say about our problems with the call center. And he explained that the live band we promised had cancelled a few days before the Celebration, and the scheduling mixup lost us the barbershop quartet group we had replaced them with (as I mentioned on the previous page). And then he thanked everybody who came out to join us on this rainy evening.

Len also spoke about the rewards of visiting patients in the hospital (to both the patient and the visitor), introduced the new members of the visiting team, and urged anyone who was interested to join as a visitor or to help in any way possible to keep the chapter running. As we keep saying, we love what we do, and some of us have been doing it for seven or eight years, but we can’t keep doing it forever - so if you want it to keep on happening, it’s up to you! “This is the most unbelievable, fantastic organization that I’ve ever belonged to,” Len said. “The rewards are great; money is very bad.”

The flowers on each table, Len said, were donated by “a young lady named Mary” (who watches over the exercise area at cardiac rehab), and he thanked the girls who served the food, and everybody who donated the many, many door prizes, and everybody else who helped make the Celebration happen. And then Len introduced “the chief of the organization, Bill Ryan.”

Bill is a pleasure to listen to (and surely he likes to talk, too). He glided from one thing to another, like “Don’t applaud, throw money!” and the wonderful support we had for putting on the Celebration and how great it is that people come out year after year in spite of the rain - “they tell me it’s good for the crops” - and the longing look he kept giving the package of two dozen golf balls that was one of the many contributed door prizes, and how panicked he was when he thought the Celebration was going to be called off, and that the Celebration would likely end earlier than usual because we didn’t have any organized entertainment. And after a few minutes of this he called Len back to the microphone to begin drawing numbered tickets for the door prizes.

We didn’t have the live music that was promised but not delivered, or the speaker we had at last year’s Celebration, but we had companionship. If you stopped talking to listen, except when Bill or Len was speaking or Tony was playing music, all you could hear was the buzz of dozens of people in conversation.

And since we didn’t stop to listen to a speaker or a band or a singing group, the Celebration of the Heart did break up earlier than usual, at about half past seven, about two and a half hours after it started, with best wishes for happy holidays.