Christopher Fontenot

about 22 hours ago

@Maya_X_0 Edius

Christopherf6K retweeted

3 days ago

In Brighton, Michigan, at a Meijer supermarket, there is a cashier who is eighty-eight years old and works five days a week, eight hours a day. He is an Army veteran. His name is Ed. His wife Joan died in 2018 after a long illness. He was back at the register the following Monday. He was there every Monday after that. When a reporter asked him why he had returned to work so quickly, he said, "I talk to everybody that came through my cashier line, because it helped me not become despondent on her loss." He has spoken with, by his own count, more customers than he can now count, at a register in a Michigan supermarket, for the last several years, because if he stopped speaking with them he would sink. He had retired once already, in 1999, from General Motors, where he had worked most of his life. In 2012, GM went bankrupt and eliminated his pension. He had spent that pension on his wife's medical care before it was taken. At the age of eighty-two, he went back to work. I want to be careful with the next part because it is real. Last December, a twenty-two-year-old Australian who runs one of the largest kindness accounts on TikTok walked into that Meijer. His name is Sam Weidenhofer. He had flown nine thousand miles because a stranger in the comments of one of his videos had said Ed's name. Sam walked up to Ed at the register. He asked him why he was still working. Ed said he had to. Sam gave him a four-hundred-dollar tip and asked if he could film him for TikTok. Then Sam started a GoFundMe. Fifteen thousand strangers gave. Donations ran from ten dollars to ten thousand. Within days, one point seven seven million dollars had been raised for a cashier at a Meijer in Michigan. Sam came back to the store with an oversized check. Ed, seeing it, said on tape, "Thank you. Oh, my God. I wish my wife were here. But it's something dreams are made of." That is what he said. He retired for the second time in January of this year. And then he did something I did not expect. He took what he needed to pay off his debts and support himself, and out of the rest, he pledged a thousand dollars each to fifty other American veterans, one in every state, and joined Sam's next campaign to try to raise ten million more for other men and women like him. He gave the gift back. At eighty-eight. To veterans he has never met. A samurai who receives an unrequested gift from an unknown lord repays it inside his lifetime. He does not send flowers. He sends service. If he cannot serve the lord directly, he serves the lord's other men. Ed Bambas is doing that. When asked how he would ever thank fifteen thousand donors, he said, "I have to find everybody and say thank you." Everybody. He is trying. He talked to everybody that came through his cashier line for six years because if he did not he would drown. Now he is trying to talk to fifteen thousand more people, to close the loop. Ed. Brighton, Michigan. Army. 88. I hope your knees hold up, sir. Your heart already has.

330

18K

3 days ago

@japan_nobunaga Marines are a different human being! Period.

Christopherf6K retweeted

Seeking the Glory that comes from Jesus Christ, the present Ruler of Heaven and Earth. Rejecting the glory that comes from man. Resisting satan and all his ppl.

4 days ago

If you leave something at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a federal employee comes along and picks it up. Not to throw it away. To keep it. It gets a number. It gets catalogued. It goes into a box on a shelf in a storage facility that is not open to the public. They have been doing this since the wall was dedicated in 1982. More than four hundred thousand objects. Combat boots. Dog tags. Medals. Photographs. Letters written to men who have been dead for fifty years by people who still had something they needed to say. Nobody planned for this. People just started leaving things, and somebody at the Park Service had to decide what the policy would be. What they decided was that you do not throw away a letter written to the dead. Almost everyone who leaves these things is anonymous. They walk up, they set it down, they go. And a government employee walks the length of that wall, picks up a letter that was never addressed to her, and puts it somewhere it will be kept forever. 🇺🇸

104

33K

Who to follow

Beau Hill 🌳🪓

@ItisJustBeau

I’m an Abolitionist and Reformed Baptist, Pawpaw to 17 grandchildren.

5 days ago

Cracking up!😂

6 days ago

I wrote a five star Google review for a diner in Georgia and I got the chef's name wrong the entire time. His name is Jimmy. I heard Jiminy. I do not know how. I wrote it four times. "Jiminy made the best grits I have eaten on this continent. Jiminy is a serious man. Jiminy did not smile once and I respected that. I bowed to Jiminy on my way out and Jiminy nodded, which in his line of work is a bear hug." I posted it. I went to sleep. The next morning the manager of the diner had replied publicly to my review. "Jiminy says thank you. Jiminy is honored. Please come back Tuesday, Jiminy is doing catfish." I read this three times. I went Tuesday. There was a new name tag on the chef. It said JIMINY. Sharpie. Masking tape. Placed over the one that said JIMMY, which was still faintly visible underneath. Jimmy did not look at me. He did not have to. The waitress said, "You're the samurai." She said it in a way that suggested this had been discussed. She said, "Jiminy says the samurai eats free today. Jiminy insists." I ate. The catfish was serious. Jiminy came out from the kitchen wiping his hands on a rag and stood beside my booth without speaking. I understood I was not being asked to speak either. We stood. He nodded. He went back. Then the man in the next booth said, "You brought us Jiminy." I said Jiminy had been there the whole time. He said, "Not like this." I have been back nine times. It is now July. The awning outside the diner has a new banner. It is small. Hand painted. It says HOME OF JIMINY. There is a drawing of what may be a cricket. Nobody has explained the cricket to me and I am afraid to ask. Last month, a food blogger from Atlanta drove ninety miles to eat here and asked at the counter whether it was true that a Japanese man had renamed the chef. The waitress said, "That's Jiminy's business." The blogger wrote it up. She used the name Jiminy fourteen times. She did not use the name Jimmy once. It has three hundred thousand views. Yesterday I received a text from the manager. Just a photo, no message. The photo was of a business card. It said JIMINY, CHEF. Below the name, in smaller letters, it said EST. BY THE SAMURAI, MARCH 2026. I did not name him. I misheard him. Georgia did the rest.

302

121

54K

Christopherf6K retweeted

7 days ago

One month after September 11, workers clearing the rubble at Ground Zero found something alive. A tree. Eight feet of blackened stump. Roots snapped. Every branch broken but one. They could have thrown it away with the rest. Nobody would have noticed. They did not. It was a Callery pear. Nobody had ever paid attention to it. It had been planted in the 1970s in the plaza between Buildings 4 and 5 of the World Trade Center, one of dozens of ornamental trees the Port Authority put in to make the concrete feel less like concrete. Office workers ate lunch under it. Tourists walked past it on their way to the observation deck. On the morning of September 11, a hundred and ten stories fell on it. Twice. In October, on the pile, someone saw a single living branch sticking out of the wreckage. Green. Still trying. A decision was made on the spot. They dug it out. The city's Parks Department took the stump to a nursery in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The horticulturists there looked at it and were not optimistic. The trunk was charred. The root system was mostly gone. Trees in that condition do not usually come back. They went to work anyway. They cleaned the burns. They trimmed the dead wood. They set it in good soil. They watered it. And they waited. That first spring, in 2002, against everything the experts expected, the stump put out blossoms. Small white flowers, on a tree that had been under the World Trade Center six months earlier. It stayed in the Bronx for nine years. Relearning how to be a tree. Growing new branches out of the old scarred wood. Getting taller. Filling out. In 2010, weeks before it was finally scheduled to go home, a storm tore through the nursery and ripped it out of the ground. The people who had been nursing it for nine years came out the next morning and found it on its side, roots exposed again. They stood it back up. They repacked the soil. It survived that too. On December 22, 2010, it was replanted at the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan, a few steps from where the South Tower had stood. Where it had been found. The eight-foot stump is now more than thirty feet tall. Walk up to it and look at the trunk. There is a line on it. Below the line, the bark is dark and gnarled and twisted. That is the wood from 2001. Above the line, the bark is smooth and pale and new. That is everything that grew after. The tree does not hide the line. It does not cover it over. The scar is right there, and the whole rest of the tree grows up and out of it. People tie tags to the railing around it. Prayers. Names. Messages to the dead. Every spring it is the first thing on the entire plaza to bloom. It goes white before the other trees have even leafed. In 2013, the Memorial started a program. They gathered seedlings from the Survivor Tree, and every year they sent them to a community that had just had its own worst day. Newtown, Connecticut, after Sandy Hook. Orlando, after Pulse. Puerto Rico, after Maria. Paris. Manchester. London. A small tree from the rubble of the World Trade Center, planted in the ground of the next place that thought it would never grow anything again. Twenty-five years ago this month, a hundred and ten stories of steel came down on a pear tree and someone on the pile saw one green branch and said, not that one. Not that one. The last living thing pulled out of Ground Zero has children now, growing all over the world. It did not survive by being untouched. It survived by growing out of the wound. 🌸

731

117K

Christopherf6K retweeted

7 days ago

The United States Navy has a warship whose bow was made from the World Trade Center. The men who built her lost their own homes in the middle of building her. They did not stop. In 2003, twenty-four tons of steel pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers were trucked south, out of New York, to a small foundry in Amite, Louisiana. Population about 4,000. The steel was to be melted down and poured into the bow stem of a new amphibious warship. The Navy had already chosen the name. USS New York. The men at the Amite foundry were metalworkers. They had melted steel their entire lives. Scrap is scrap. It goes in the furnace. This did not go in the furnace like scrap. Witnesses said the workers handled it the way people handle relics. Some of them reached out and touched it as they walked past, gently, the way you would touch a coffin. Nobody told them to. Nobody could have explained to an outsider why grown men in a foundry in rural Louisiana were laying their hands on twisted beams from a building fifteen hundred miles away. One man who had worked at that foundry for forty years was scheduled to retire before the pour. He postponed his retirement so he could be there when the towers went into the fire. On September 9, 2003, they poured. Seven and a half tons of World Trade Center steel became the stem of the bow. The leading edge. The part of the ship that touches the ocean first. The ship was built at the Avondale shipyard in New Orleans. Keel laid in August 2004. Twelve hundred Louisiana workers. Welders, pipefitters, electricians, shipwrights. Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina came up out of the Gulf and drowned the city they lived in. Their houses were under water. Their neighborhoods were gone. Some of them lost family. The shipyard itself was hit. There was every reason on earth for the work to stop. The twelve hundred came back. Men who were sleeping in shelters, in trailers, in cars, showed up at the yard and went back to work on New York's ship. A firefighter from New York who came down for the christening said it out loud, the thing everyone in the yard already knew. This ship shows the strength of the country, past 9/11, past Katrina. Two cities, two disasters, one hull. She was christened on March 1, 2008, at Avondale, with the families of 9/11 victims in the stands. In the fall of 2009 she sailed for the first time, down the Mississippi and out into the Gulf and up the East Coast. On November 2, 2009, she came up the Hudson River into New York Harbor. She stopped in front of Ground Zero. The crew manned the rails in dress uniform. The ship rendered honors, a 21-gun salute, to the empty sky where the towers had stood, from a bow made out of them. Five days later, on November 7, she was commissioned into the Navy in New York, in front of thousands. Her crest shows a phoenix rising out of two gray towers. Her motto is on the crest. "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget." She is 684 feet long. She carries 800 Marines. She has deployed all over the world since. And at the very front of her, below the waterline, cutting through every wave she has ever met, is seven and a half tons of the World Trade Center. The steel that fell on September 11 was twisted, black, and buried. Louisiana dug it out, melted it, and sent it back to sea. Pointed forward. Hitting the waves first. 🇺🇸

126

862

100K

6 days ago

Reminds me of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” Good stuff!

7 days ago

Nine months after September 11, a village in Kenya with no electricity, no running water, and no roads gave America the most valuable thing it had. Fourteen cows. This is not a joke. It is one of the most serious gifts this country has ever received. Kimeli Naiyomah grew up in Enoosaen, a Maasai village near the Tanzanian border. His family was so poor they owned no cattle. Among the Maasai, that is the bottom. A family without cows is barely counted as a family. At fourteen he ran away to a school where the lessons were held under a tree. He walked. He had no shoes, no books, no money. He asked to be let in anyway. Years later he was a student at Stanford, in California, studying to be a doctor. On September 11, 2001, he happened to be in New York City. He watched the towers fall. He was a Maasai warrior. Warriors are trained from childhood to run toward danger. He wanted to run to the pile. He could not help there. He did not know what to do with what he had seen. Months later he went home to Enoosaen. The elders had heard something on the radio. Vaguely. A place called New York. Buildings. Some of them had not heard at all. Nobody in the village had ever seen a skyscraper. Nobody had been on an airplane. The idea of a building a hundred stories tall, full of thousands of people, falling down, was not something the language had words for. Kimeli sat with them and explained. Slowly. What a tower was. How many people. What it looked like when it came down. He told them what he had seen with his own eyes. The elders listened. When he finished, one of them asked a question. "What can we do for these poor people?" Kimeli had already decided. He had saved money in America. He wanted to buy a cow, the first cow his family had ever owned, and he wanted to give it to the United States. To the Maasai, a cow is not livestock. A cow is life. It is wealth, food, standing, survival. An elder explained it to a reporter in one sentence. A cow is the handkerchief we Maasai use to wipe away tears. Kimeli asked the elders for their blessing to give his one cow to America. Then, one by one, the elders stood up. They wanted to give too. In the end, fourteen families pledged fourteen cows. In a community of about ten thousand people who owned almost nothing else. On June 3, 2002, the United States chargé d'affaires in Kenya, William Brencick, traveled to Enoosaen. A flight, then more than half a day by road across terrain that barely counts as road. When he arrived, hundreds of Maasai in red robes were waiting. Some held hand-lettered banners. "To the people of America, we give these cows to help you." The elders presented the fourteen cows. Brencick accepted them on behalf of the United States. He called it the highest expression of regard and sympathy. Then there was a practical problem. How do you ship fourteen sacred cows to New York? The answer the two sides arrived at was better than shipping them. The cows would stay in Kenya. They would belong to the United States of America. The Maasai would care for them, forever, as America's herd. They are still there. The original fourteen have multiplied into dozens. Each one carries a mark carved into its ear, the outline of two towers. Their offspring fund scholarships for the children of the village. The U.S. embassy built a school there, and a water project. When the story reached America, forty thousand people wrote letters to the village. A painting of the fourteen cows hangs in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. A children's book about them became a national bestseller. Kimeli's own explanation was the shortest. To heal a sorrowing heart, give something that is dear to your own. A village that had never seen a skyscraper, that could not have found New York on a map, that owned almost nothing, gave America the one thing it valued most. Somewhere in Kenya tonight, there are cows with towers carved into their ears. They are ours. They were given to wipe our tears. 🇺🇸🇰🇪

304

14K

235K

Christopherf6K retweeted

7 days ago

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating. So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual. They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive. More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground. That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something. The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her. She was the last. After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody. Nobody. Day after day. The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone. A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite. It was breaking them. An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next. They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers. The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in. Picture that. A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog. And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive. And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates. They called them mock finds. They did it for the dogs. They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for. One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors. But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur. One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers. Corliss asked where his friend was. The man pointed at the pile. "He's in there somewhere." He kept petting the dog. Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11. On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep. Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past. They draped her in an American flag on the way out. Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living. They found one. And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart. That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really. Nobody could save the dead. So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

543

40K

7 days ago

I did not know this!

7 days ago

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

877

56K

11K

148

8 days ago

@Xtopher_Uzo It doesn’t say it specifically. But remember, it IS THE WORD OF GOD and satan has been trying to get everyone to question its authority since The Garden. So be careful lest you be like him. Go read 2Tim 3:16-17

215

8 days ago

@CatholicDrip___ And let’s not forget the 30ish years when there was 2 and then 3 popes. I thought yall taught it was the Holy Spirit which guided the votes of the cardinals. I guess he wasn’t paying much attention to details.

8 days ago

@CatholicDrip___ So in the 13th and 18th centuries when there was no pope for a couple years, what happened? Do yall still count that as “unbroken.”

9 days ago

@Xtopher_Uzo Augustine…wrong Jerome…wrong Thomas Aquinas…wrong.

14 days ago

@ShaneSchaetzel I noticed you didn’t give a single Biblical passage to support your claim.