It’s not often that a trip to Culver’s is truly memorable and even moving, but that’s what happened last night when Kathy and I went there for supper. It might be more accurate to say that Kathy and I and two-thirds of Racine County went there for supper. And the reason was a horrific accident earlier this summer which any of you from Wisconsin have surely heard about – a crash in which a young boy was miraculously plucked from an upended van completely engulfed in flames. (The scene was caught on home video.) How he survived that – and how the two men who rescued him survived that – is beyond me. (His two rescuers were off-duty fire fighters, and I suppose if anyone would be able to perform such a feat, it would be them.) The accident on July 19th left 4-year-old D.J. Harper with very serious burns and the prospect of eight months of hospitalization. Can you imagine it?
Anyway, this young boy probably shouldn’t be alive- but IS – and Culver’s Restaurant decided to do something special to help out the family with what promises to be a mountain of medical bills and all of the other unexpected expenses which come with a disaster like this. (They do not have health insurance.) So Culver’s announced that 26 participating restaurants ( I assume most of them arein southeastern Wisconsin, since the accident happened in Milwaukee) would donate 10% of their August 17th sales to the Harper family. So that’s why we made a point of going to Culver’s last night.
As we drove up, we saw some sort of traffic tie-up in the entrance to the parking lot. . . and quickly realized that it was because there were 7 cars lined up before the drive-thru speaker. . . and 6 lined up between the speaker and the drive-up window . . . for a grand total of 13 cars in the drive-thru lane. The parking lot itself (once he had found a way into it) was more crowded than we have ever seen it . . . and inside the restaurant there were lines of 8 or 9 people at all four cash registers. It was a madhouse in the best sense of the word. . . all ages, all colors, all shapes and sizes, trying to do something kind for someone they’d never even met.
It felt good to be part of such a throng. . . and this is coming from someone who HATES to wait for food. . . and especially hates to wait for fast food. (Ask anyone who has had the unpleasant experience of dining with me when there is an unexpected wait involved. I go from St. Francis of Assisi to Frankenstein in no time flat.) But standing in line for almost ten minutes and waiting another twenty-five for our Butterburgers somehow didn’t seem like significant suffering. Not compared to what little D.J. Harper is dealing with.
pictured above: Count the cars. . . 7 of them leading up to the speaker. . . and if you could see the other side of the building, you would see 6 more cars in line. And according to the paper, this was the scene at all of the participating restaurants. Maybe there’s hope for this world after all.