Jeff Hampton – Page 86 – Jeff Hampton, Writer

July 13, 2021

Grab and Go

For Wilshire Baptist Church

If you had just 15 minutes to grab whatever you could out of all your earthly possessions, what would you grab?

That was the impossible challenge presented last weekend to residents of the Crestview Towers condominiums in North Miami Beach, Florida. The building was evacuated and has been deemed unsafe following the horrific collapse of the Champlain Towers condo building a few miles away in Surfside. Crestview will remain closed until it can be recertified and only then after structural and electrical repairs have been made. There is some hope that the residents can return someday, but there also is the possibility that the building will be condemned as was the case for the half of the Champlain building that didn’t collapse. The Crestview residents may lose everything, so that 15 minutes when they were allowed to go back in to grab their stuff was fraught with tough decisions.

July 6, 2021July 6, 2021

Forever

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Watching “A Capitol Fourth” on PBS, I had a thought as the military band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever”: they were playing the same arrangement I’ve played countless times over the years beginning in junior high school. And listening to a recording from 1909, it’s pretty much the same arrangement that composer John Philip Sousa premiered in 1897. I find a curious comfort in knowing I’ve been part of something that has been so constant.

June 29, 2021

Swing it Forward

For Wilshire Baptist Church

It was one of those crazy, amazing coincidences that can’t be explained but just enjoyed – and paid forward when the opportunity comes.

After nine years of Texas weather, our porch swing was falling apart. The chains were rusting and the fake poly wicker was popping off in pieces, exposing the metal and wood frame underneath and generally looking shabby. Saturday afternoon we visited a couple of specialty stores we thought might have swings but they didn’t. We decided to look at Lowe’s on Northwest Highway before going home and shopping online, which is how we got the first swing.