humansofnewyork: (1/3) “I was a Prada-suit motherfucker. I was running a limousine company. But when
humansofnewyork: (1/3) “I was a Prada-suit motherfucker. I was running a limousine company. But when the last financial crisis hit, I lost all my lines of credit and the whole thing came apart. I felt too old to start again. My wife would come home from work and find me still in my pajamas, reading magazines and newspapers. This was in August, when school really starts to crank up. So I kept seeing these articles about underfunded schools: no art, no gym, no music. My kids went to private school, so these conditions were hard for me to imagine. It seemed sensational. So one morning I got on the subway and took it to 135th street in Harlem. I couldn’t have been more arrogant. I walked through the doors of the first elementary school I could find, asked for the principal, and said: ‘I’m here to try to break the cycle of poverty.’ She assigned me to the lunchroom, and that’s where I started volunteering five days a week. I was just going from table to table, talking to the kids. But they gravitated toward me. They listened to me. They called me ‘Mr. Tony.’ At home I was just ‘Dad.’ I was kinda a dick. I was old news. But Mr. Tony was bigger than Barack Obama. These kids loved the shit out of me. I had nothing to give, nothing to promise. But they acted like I was Santa Claus. Each one of them reminded me of my own kids. It was the exact same goofiness. So when I learned that almost half of them were living in homeless shelters, that shit drove me crazy. It tore me up. I was looking for some way to help, anything. Across the street from the school was an old community garden that had been abandoned. It was full of junk: car over here, engine over there. The kids called it the ‘haunted garden,’ cause it was nothing but cats, rats, and scary old people. So I contacted the Parks Department. I did the paperwork. I got the license and the key. Then I started hauling out the junk, one piece at a time. It took me six weeks. The kids kept asking me what I was planning to do, but I had no idea. Then one morning a little girl tugged on my shoulder. A tiny little thing with glasses so big. Her name was Nevaeh. ‘Heaven’ spelled backwards. And she said: ‘Mr. Tony, why don’t we plant something?” -- source link