Thanksgiving Afternoon in Rockaway Park: Occupy Sandy Community Thanksgiving Dinner at St. Camillus R.C. Church

After working inside sorting,

stacking,

but mostly dealing with garbage and gratefully getting answers and taking orders from a 10-year-old boy much more experienced at Occupy Sandy Recovery efforts than we are,

we went outside to help with Thanksgiving dinner outdoors in the St. Camillus Church parking lot, facing the beach and ocean and what was the boardwalk that we loved so much. At one point we were manning dessert table #2 with Elliot, serving pumpkin pie and other pastries and giving out coloring books, crayons and playing cards.

We did some other stuff like serving drinks and cleaning up, but we also had time to talk with the incredibly hard-working people from Occupy Sandy -- people like Miguel and Christine and Diego and Kristina and many others -- and to enjoy our own dinner on a beautiful day at the beach.

Father Richard gave a nice toast after a number of Occupy Sandy people spoke.

It was a beautiful Thanksgiving day, and we are very grateful for all the people who worked hard to make it possible.

Before we returned to Brooklyn, we had some time to walk to the beach amid the ruins of the boardwalk. We spent so much of our lives on the Rockaway boardwalk going back to the early 1950s, it's hard to see it destroyed.

This is what our poor old block, Beach 118th Street, where we got our first apartment back in 1979, looked like after Sandy hit:

But in Rockaway, the ocean waves still roll in, and we're hopeful that in some form, the boardwalk will be rebuilt so that young kids can have memories of it the way we did. (Here is a photo our grandfather took of us 43 years ago in November 1969 when we were 18.)