Canon Luis Garibay has helped host 17 St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park community Thanksgiving dinners, organizing volunteers, cadging for donated turkeys, and mashing more than his share of potatoes.
Dinner is served until 2 p.m. today. As we flung the doors open this morning, Luis and our Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles volunteers enjoyed the support of our resident partners — Seeds of Hope, Nefesh, the Immaculate Heart Community, St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, Echo Park, and Holy Spirit Echo Park / Silver Lake.
Bless all these volunteers and our benefactors. Stopping by to say a few words of welcome and prayer, I met a half-dozen workers affiliated with Nefesh, a progressive Jewish community, including a record producer (check out Secretly Canadian) from Highland Park helping look after the dessert table who showed me a photo she’d had taken with our former Echo Park neighbor, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne.
Among those waiting to be served was a first-generation Guatemalan neighbor who told me proudly about his daughter, who works for NASA, and a son about to graduate college in San Diego.
Helping preside as always was another longtime friend of the annual event, the unofficial mayor of Echo Park, Canon Bob Williams.