One hundred twenty-one first-generation Drifters invited; volunteers to drive them to the ceremony

The ceremony begins at noon on Sept. 7. It opens with "Lullaby of the Shore," sung in public for the first time by a 28-member junior high school choir. The oldest invitee is 101; the average age is in the late seventies. The 121 names on the list are about half the number of a decade ago.

Seating for invitees has been consolidated into the first four rows, and the stage moved six meters forward to shorten the distance. Making room for wheelchair routes leaves 80 fewer general seats than last year. For those who cannot travel to the park, the ceremony will be relayed to three welfare facilities in the city; the playback volume for the lullaby was agreed in advance with each facility. Preparations began in earnest on the 1st, with municipal staff measuring out rows of white folding chairs against a seating chart on a clipboard. "We widened the spacing by a row, so last year's drawing is useless," one said.

The volunteer driving scheme is new this year. More than 240 people applied for 80 places. The city screened them on driving history and vehicle conditions and held a half-day training session in late August covering boarding assistance and, above all, the procedure for calling off a trip if an invitee is unwell that morning. The line repeated hardest in training: wanting to go must never outrank the judgment of whether one can.

A university student, 20, who was accepted said: "Someone from the timeline we studied in class gets into my passenger seat as the old man down the road. It sounds strange, but the textbook talks." He visited his assigned invitee once in August. "We stood in the entryway talking for twenty minutes. Five of those were about the pickup time." A first-generation woman, 88, will attend for the first time in three years. "I stopped going when the bus route added one transfer. At my age it isn't the distance. It's the number of transfers."

The city's children and youth bureau, which runs the ceremony, put it plainly: "The ceremony comes once a year, but the invitation list gets shorter every year. The event has to keep pace with how fast the list shortens." Whether to expand the driving scheme next year will be decided after seeing how the day goes.

Aging has already reshaped the form of the event. The first-generation representative's address, once its centerpiece, has been given jointly with second- and third-generation speakers for five years. This year a custom lectern of reduced height has been made so that the first-generation speaker can talk without rising from a chair. A cross-party group of legislators is seeking to make Remembrance Day a national holiday. "A holiday would make it easier for some to come," a city official said. "But the number who can come falls at its own speed."

The invitation list is drawn from the city's register of first-generation Drifters, whose original roll was compiled in the reception camps in Torek 1 and rewritten with every notification of relocation or death since. Notices go out each June; those who do not reply are telephoned, and if still unreached, a district welfare commissioner is asked to call. The number invited and the number replying drift further apart each year: 148 notices this year produced 121 acceptances, with 19 declining for health reasons and 8 never reached. Ten years ago there were 237 invitees; five years ago, 174. The decline has slowed slightly over the past two years. "We do not know why it slowed," a city official said. "We only count."

A former staff member, 72, who ran the venue until a decade ago still volunteers there each year. "We used to run out of chairs and people stood at the back. Now chairs are left over. Deciding on the day where to put the leftover chairs is the hard part." A woman of 58, daughter of an invitee, resisted the volunteer driving at first. "Putting my father in a stranger's car — I couldn't say why, but I didn't like it. Then the student came for a look and measured the height of my father's shoes. He was checking the seat height for getting in and out. That decided me."

Bags will be checked around the venue on the day. Gates open at 10:30 a.m., with separate entrances for invitees and the general public. The 7th is also the last day of the TDA's concentrated observation program; equipment will stand on the seawall east of the park, clear of visitor routes. The ceremony will go ahead in rain; in severe weather invitees alone move indoors and the public watches the relay. The call comes at 8 a.m. "The only thing on our minds," the official said, "is not creating any time in which these people are made to wait."