Mayme Mosteller had been watching the pizza grow cold for an hour.
The 29-year-old mother had organized a splash pad party in Springdale, Arkansas, for her son Miles’s third birthday. She invited friends, other mothers with children his age, and created a Facebook event. But by seven in the evening, with the cupcakes melting in the sun, she realized that almost no one was going to show up. She wrote to her group of friends out of state, devastated, feeling that she had let her own son down. It was Kellie, one of them, who told her something that sounded almost absurd: call the firefighters.
Mosteller called the Springdale Fire Department’s non-emergency number with little hope. They were about to leave when she saw the truck pull in. Miles ran toward it without hesitating for a second, convinced that those men had come just for him. And in a way, they had: they gave him his first firefighter badge, let him climb aboard, sound the alarm, and explore every corner of the vehicle. The day before, Miles had said that he wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up.
“Now, instead of remembering who didn’t come, I focus on who did show up”, Mosteller says. The video she uploaded to thank Station 8 ended up being seen by half the world.