After
a long week I left the house this morning with some trepidation. Our son still
hasn’t completely recovered and his schedule has been off lately. And with him
still on the mend, I knew that I wouldn’t have my family with me in Ardmore as
I had been expecting when I originally organized the event. As I woke up early
this morning, I knew that it was going to be a long day but I was also looking
forward to reconnecting with a few of the brothers as we all converged upon the
lodge for our spring Blood Drive.
Arriving
at the lodge a few minutes later than expected (thanks to abnormal Saturday traffic), I didn’t waste any time in
coordinating with the Red Cross drivers parked next to the building and immediately
opened the doors, turned on the lights, and adjusted the heat. With these minor
preparations out of the way, I finally turned around and assessed the space
only to find that nothing was ready for the event. So the work continued and
even though we had to spend an additional twenty or thirty minutes in setting
up the space, everything was ready to go by the time our first appointment
arrived at 10:00am.
As
usual, the bulk of the appointments were at opposite ends of the day with
morning schedules and late afternoon schedules proving to be the most flexible.
By the time lunch came around, the steady flow of people had slowed to a
trickle and we found ourselves falling well short of our goal for the day. In
actuality, while not great our attendance was pretty good but we ran into a
number of hiccups along the way as there was an unusually high number of people
disqualified from donating (new travel restrictions in particular where not
helping).
The
afternoon brought a welcomed flurry of activity both in donations and other
brothers joining us for a couple of hours. In the end, while we only received
12 out of a possible 21 donations, it also provided many of us the opportunity
to meet brothers whom we had not seen in some time, brothers from other lodges,
and also members of the community and from the extended masonic family. It
would have been nice to have held a successful blood drive but there was at least
some good that came out of the event in the way of fellowship, sure up plans
for other events, and gaining greater understanding of what we need to do next
time around to far exceed the number of donations that we have received the
last two events.
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