All in a Year's Worth of Work

I am a helper. I am caring. I am one who stops running to help the person who tripped next to me. Through the values that a single mother instilled in me as a child to the values I gained from being a fraternity man of Alpha Sigma Phi and Fraternity/Sorority Life, I learned that it only takes the leadership and courage of one individual to create change. Margaret Mead argued, “Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.”

Last summer I was searching to get involved in a cause that required communities to unite and work together to achieve a common goal. That’s when I came across the Global Peace Foundation’s Safe Haven campaign on human trafficking prevention. Upon seeing no community support groups for victims and survivors in all of the Northeast United States and learning that this heinous act is a $32 billion industry preying on more than 100,000 Americans, I knew something had to change.

Four weeks of training 31 fraternity men later, Alpha Sigma Phi became a certified Safe Haven and a source of help for victims. Leading a men’s organization in this fight resulted in a news story on WPTZ which caught the attention of our headquarters, the local Rotary Club, and Dr. Susan Ryan who teaches a human trafficking course at the University of Vermont.

I have found my calling through this campaign: I started a journey toward ending gender violence, an epidemic affecting 1-in-5 females and 1-in-16 males across college campuses. Being a male in a fraternity does not mean I cannot be an advocate for sexual assault prevention. It is individuals like myself who need to lead the engagement of these conversations with other students.

Since the beginning of February, I have been working with Title IX Coordinator Butterfly Blaise not as an intern but as a resource to bring Jonathan Kalin, founder of Party with Consent and Male Athletes Against Violence, to campus. I have been securing funding through CAS grants and even presented in front of the SA Senate as to why they should fund this presentation. All 16 senators voted unanimously for the event’s funding.

It is my goal through this event to unite communities across campus to be a part of the conversation and register groups for individual workshops with Kalin throughout the day.

I have also been volunteering for North Country Honor Flight, a nonprofit that sends World War II and Korean War veterans to see their war memorial in Washington D.C. at no cost to these heroes. As a group leader in this campaign, I supervise other volunteers to ensure we are successful in raising the $12,000 and locating 14 veterans needed to experience one last mission.

My friends and family often ask me, “How do you do it?” Although at times I may feel overwhelmed, I respond by saying, “A cup of coffee and a dream can take you anywhere.”

Music Takes Me Away

Living with anxiety, especially in college, is difficult. I constantly worry about stuff I shouldn't be worrying about in that moment and thinking about all of the duties I need to get done each day gives me mounting stress.

But there's one thing that always remedies the situation: playing music.

When I was just 3 years old, my family had this old brown piano sitting in our basement. Nobody in my family was musical, though. I think it had just come with the house. So when my mother went down into the basement to do laundry, I would go down with her and sit at the piano.

What my mom describes happening is her toddler not just slamming his hands on the ivory keys, but trying carefully to play keys in a way that a pianist would.

Since then, I have taught myself to play four different instruments: guitar, piano, bass and drums. I have no idea where this skill came from, but when I hear a song it stays with me forever, and I can immediately apply it to an instrument within five minutes.

And when I do, something magical happens. Playing music takes me away from the worries of my life. It is my escape from reality. Without the constant communication between music and my soul, I'm not sure how else I would deal with my stress and anxiety besides laying in bed all day. And I'm willing to bet Beethoven was not a couch potato.

The Greatest Generation Never Forgotten

I still remember the scent of his aftershave as his scruff scratched my soft skin when I hugged him goodbye. My Grandpa Tony fought in World War II, and that’s all I know about his military involvement. I didn’t know what he did, where he was or what the war was even over. I didn’t know because I was only in the first grade when my hero died.

I say “hero” because now that I’m much older and have a better understanding of this great patriotic war—a war full of personal sacrifice for the cause of freedom—I realize what a fascinating man my grandfather really was.

My Grandpa Tony created the mold of what I thought a man should be. A man provided and cared for his family, a man cooked delicious Sunday Italian dinners, a man had a yearning to learn something new every day.

He also taught me a thing or two about what true love is.

The distance between the two forced my grandparents to write letters to each other. Grandpa Tony started each letter with “My Darling Dorothy” written carefully in the neatest script. You could tell that writing these letters was like trying to craft poetry for the two of them.

Even though I was too young to know much about my grandfather, I quickly realized he was a man I wanted to emulate as I learned more about him as I grew up. There’s a reason they call his generation the greatest; they are the reasons we enjoy most of the freedoms we have today.

From working with North Country Honor Flight, a nonprofit that sends World War II and Korean War veterans to see their memorial in Washington D.C., I see how important remembering and honoring the sacrifices these men made is while being a part of a generation that often forgets about these heroes.

I wish my grandfather could have stuck around later than he did so that I could have seen him go on “one last mission” to see his war memorial. But he is honored each and every day by his grandson who strives to be as great of a man as he was.

Help the remaining few hundred North Country World War II veterans experience Honor Flight by making a donation here.

On the Road with a Broken Heart

         

 

           Valentine’s Day seemed like it happened yesterday. Easter, the third busiest holiday, is only a week away. The men who work in the warehouse are bustling around the dock as the clock strikes 6, picking and packing flower orders and breaking down boxes of flowers, vases and other floral products to their respective door. Each delivery run has its own door. Every Thursday door one is dedicated to LCT (Lower Connecticut), LNM (Long North Malone) at door two, SN (Short North) at door three and SW (Southwest) at door four. Seagroatt Riccardi is a wholesale distributor of flowers for florists in the Northeast United States.

            Sweating in their shirt and tie as a result of the day’s end of work, the operations crew is behind schedule tonight. The delivery staff makes their way into the steel door leading into the warehouse. Of course, Jim is the first one to walk in the door. Jim has a tendency to come in about an hour early each day that he works. There is no dress code for delivery staff, but the 60-year-old’s day-to-day outfit gives the appearance of a uniform: light blue faded jeans with a baby blue Lake George sweater and a large rosary necklace that dangles loosely around his neck.

            “Good morning, everybody!” he says as he walks in front of the will call desk, making his way to the punch-in clock. Though the sun has already gone down, the day has just begun for Jim who has just woken up two hours ago.

            His voice is raw and hoarse as a result of smoking Marlboros. Though a fairly small and thin man standing at about 5 feet, 4 inches, his voice is boisterous enough for a giant.

            “Sorry, Jim, you have a huge load tonight,” Tom the warehouse supervisor said in an apathetic kind of way.

            “Figures,” Jim said. “I always get fucked over at this place.”

            At this very moment, imagine somebody approaching Jim after having just worked an eight-hour shift and saying, “Hey, Jim, I’ll go on your run with you for $10 and Denny’s.” It happened.

            “You’re kidding, right?” No sir. Only having enough money to buy cigarettes on the road, Jim left to go grab more cash back at his apartment in Cohoes about 10 minutes away.

            The other truck drivers began approaching, shooting bribes of all-you-can-eat Denny’s. But what they didn’t know was that this wasn’t actually about $10 and Denny’s — it was about Jim’s story.

            Every last box was loaded onto the southwest truck as tall as a 6-foot man, stretching to the end of the truck with only a couple feet to spare. Jim had just gotten back.

            “So you’re really going with me?” He kept asking this question several times. Jim had always tried persuading the operations crew to go on his run, especially during busy holidays like Christmas, by paying them $80-$100 out of pocket, but for someone to help him for virtually nothing seemed like a gift from God to him.

            The truck was parked outside waiting in the parking lot. Jim poked his head out of the window and yelled, “Hey! Do you smoke?!” Assuming he was talking about cigarettes, the response was “No.”

            Expecting the passenger’s seat to be unoccupied, the presence of Deon, one of the local drivers, was surprising. Because he shares a car with his girlfriend and both of them were at work, Deon needed a ride to her job in Niskayuna, just down the road from Seagroatt’s.

            “We just have to drop Deon off real quick,” Jim explained to me. “Wherever you can find room, go ahead and pop a squat.”

            The space between the two seats of the truck provided the capacity necessary to curl up in a ball on the floor.

            Deon was wearing a flannel with a black puffy vest layered over it, giving more shape to his already portly body — winter’s bitterness was still lingering.

            “I’ve got a big load tonight, huh?” Jim said to Deon.

            “Yo, Jim, you still got big loads atcho age?” Deon quipped back.

            “I like to think so.”

            This ride isn’t going to be like this all night, is it?

            The topic of conversation quickly took a turn from sexual innuendos to Jim’s past. His wife, Kristin, had passed away from liver cancer in May 2012.

            “You know, Jim, I’m really glad you’re back to normal and happy again,” Deon said in a genuinely sincere manner. After Kristin’s burial, Jim spent the first few nights sleeping next to the headstone in Hudson View Cemetery in Mechanicville. The spring nights still brought temperatures in the 40s. Jim didn’t care.

            “I was miserable,” Jim said. “That’s why I had to move out of that house. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself. When people tell me to go to hell, I tell them I’ve been there.”

            Arriving outside of what appeared to be a cell phone store, Deon got out of the truck and walked in front of the truck to cross the road. Jim pulled the string attached to the top of the cab, boisterously sounding the horn three times. Everybody in the store, including Deon’s girlfriend, looked outside to see what was going on. As Jim was waving his hand with an ear-to-ear grin on his face more times than Miss America, Deon had a look of embarrassment on his face.

            “Deon really has a heart of gold, you know that?”

            Deon would call Jim after his wife died to check up on him even during the night when nothing seemed like it should be checked up on.

            The first two stops were Hannafords: one in Niskayuna and one in Altamont. The process for delivering Hannaford product was the same for each stop: Back the truck up into a space that seems virtually impossible to fit in and unload the boxes with the sticker labeled with the appropriate Hannaford location written on it. More importantly, just make sure the number of boxes you pull off the truck matches the piece count on the driver’s manifest. The product is stacked two boxes high on a U-boat cart and is then wheeled out through the receiving area into the produce section.

            Seeing where and how pallets of food are stored for shoppers to buy is quite a weird sight. Nobody would notice if Jim were to just take a Gatorade for the road, but if he were to try this out in the grocery store, there would be an arrest made in aisle two.

            The stops weren’t hard. Driving an hour in between each stop was the most challenging part. Similar to Wes Craven’s “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, the goal was staying awake.

            “Now I have to warn you about one thing,” Jim said as he just merged east onto Interstate 88 toward Stamford Florist. The tone of his voice was frightening. “Sometimes I micro-nap while I’m driving. Do you know what that is?”

            Micro-napping is when the driver falls asleep at the wheel for less than a second — long enough to feel the sensation of dreaming. According to a poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, 103 million people have actually fallen asleep at the wheel. Jim better not make it 103,000,001 tonight. Jim is mandated by Seagroatt Riccardi to pull over every three or four hours to rest for 15 minutes. What was that going to do?

            Jim took his first nap at about 11 p.m. near Oneonta. He rested his legs on the dashboard and sank into his seat, his body leaning on the side of the door for support. For any ordinary person, the position was beyond uncomfortable, but for Jim, these naps were a luxury. The grimy looking New York Fire Department hat that appeared as if it was a lighter shade of gray back in its day was gently placed over Jim’s face. Only God knew what Jim was dreaming about.

            The sound of the reefer, which keeps the product cold, awakened Jim. The next stop was in Binghamton.

            “This year would have been our 40^th anniversary,” Jim said. Nothing had been said prior to this statement to make him say this. He had been dreaming of her — it only took 15 minutes.

            Last year, Kristin went to the doctor for what seemed like a normal check-up. But the doctors had found a tumor near her liver. Jim took her to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the best cancer treatment facilities in the United States. After running several tests, the doctor came back into the examination room with a grim look on his face.

            “The doctor said, ‘You really wanna know how much time you have left, Kris? Two weeks.’ And she said, ‘Two weeks?! That long?!’ I fell to the ground bawling my eyes out.”

            While Jim was hyperventilating and pacing back and forth not knowing what to do, Kristin just laid there content in her bed with a smile on her face — she was ready. Kristin would pass away surrounded by family exactly two weeks later at St. Peter’s Hospice in Albany.

            “I had never seen so many people crammed into one room like that before,” Jim said.

            Following Kristin’s death, Jim was emotionally unstable living by himself in the house he once lived in with his wife. A letter came in the mail from Social Security saying, “Your marriage was ended by death.” The harshness of just six little words possesses enough power to affect anybody’s psyche. One night, Jim made his way into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet. Kristin’s cancer medication stared Jim straight in the eyes. Looking back at the pills that exhibited all shapes, sizes and colors of the rainbow, he contemplated swallowing these pills in order to end his own life until he thought about the rest of his family.

            “If it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

            Right before the next Hannaford in Binghamton there was a Denny’s on the same road.

            “You want to stop here or find another one later?”

            Afraid that there wouldn’t be another one, the answer was “yes.” We walked inside at about 1 a.m. The night crew at Denny’s is — well, different. Our waitress who was wearing more eye shadow than a drag queen showed us to our seat. The diner was promoting some special called Baconalia, an entire menu filled with bacon-based foods.

            “Now I’m going to be sick to my fucking stomach,” Jim said. “Do people actually eat this shit?”

            Though Jim was exaggerating, his analogy wasn’t far from the truth.

“You get whatever you want, OK? I don’t care how much it is.”

Nobody had ever helped Jim on a run before. And as a matter of fact, he had never stopped to eat “breakfast” on the road in all his years of driving trucks. The ceramic coffee mug depicting the Denny’s logo on it had a quote written on the opposite side that read, “It’s always sunny side up in a diner.” I jokingly told Jim that I wanted to take it with me as a souvenir.

“How much do I have to pay you to take one of these coffee cups?” Jim asked a waitress who was not responsible for serving our table.

The waitress looked at him with a blank stare. I could tell she had never heard anybody ask this question before. Extra napkins or sugar packets were one thing, but for someone to bribe a waitress for a coffee cup? Jim took his New York Fire Department hat and hid the mug in it. When he paid the bill he passed me the hat underneath the table and told me to wait for him in the truck. We were outlaws on the run in the middle of the night.

Jim’s work cell phone rang and he looked over at me as if to say, “Well, aren’t you fucking going to pick it up?” I picked up the archaic flip-phone and answered it.

“Uh, hi is Jim there?” the woman’s voice asked.

Handing the phone over to Jim, his smile immediately radiated the darkness of the cab. It was Laurie, a woman from the Lake George village who Jim had been dating for a couple of months now.

“That was Chris,” Jim explains. “He’s helping me on my run tonight. I didn’t think people like him existed anymore.”

Jim met Laurie through a mutual friend. Laurie had called him, asking if he wanted to go out to get a cup of coffee sometime. Not feeling comfortable dating another woman just months after the death of his wife, Jim politely declined. That is, until he had a change of heart and asked to take her out the second time around.

“Guess where we stopped to eat?” Jim, still talking on the phone, asked Laurie. “Denny’s.”

Their first date had been at the Racino, a casino and raceway in Saratoga. After a night of gambling, Jim and Laurie had decided that they were hungry and wanted to eat somewhere. Though it doesn’t seem like a romantic place for a first date, they ate at a nearby Denny’s.

Whenever Jim is out on the road, Laurie makes him leave her a voice message on her cell phone at 5 a.m. so that she can wake up to his voice every morning even though he’s not there.

“I’m starting to run out of things to say,” Jim said as he was thinking of new ways to hone his poetry skills.

“I’m the luckiest motherfucker out there, you know that? I lucked out twice in my life.”

Jim had just finished leaving Laurie her voice message and the truck was en route back to the warehouse. It must’ve been a little past five when I felt my eyes starting to blur and get heavy.

The weight of my body whipped me forward. I woke up to see Jim frantically cranking the wheel to the right. Jim drove over the wakeup strips for about five seconds until the truck came to a complete stop with the help of the air brake.

“I fell asleep,” Jim confessed.

Seagroatt Riccardi made me stay on the clock for liability purposes. Handing all of my trust over to Jim, I thought the idea was trivial — until now. For the first time, I had realized how difficult staying awake can really be even if pots of coffee flow through your bloodstream like Jim’s. We slept double the amount allowed by the mandated resting periods.

The truck pulled into the parking lot after twelve hours on the road. Friday morning’s operations crew already clocked in and had received a shipment that just came in from Miami.

Spending the night on the road next to Jim was a life lesson. I saw the sun rise for the first time in years. I had learned the importance of coffee and how good it tastes after being deprived of such a delicacy. But most importantly, I had gotten to know Jim.

“I want to thank you for going on this run with me,” Jim said to me. I could tell this was his heart speaking and not the truck driver in him.

“Hopefully we can do this again sometime when you’re home for the summer.”

He could see how tired I was based on my bloodshot eyes and the one-word responses being given to him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Jim started. “What I want you to do is just get out of this place, get in your car and go home."

            And I did just that. But there was something different about the road I was driving home on. It was missing something. The road back home lacked the heart and soul compared to the road I traveled on with Jim.

Plattsburgh's Relay for Life

For about a month now, I have been raising money for SUNY Plattsburgh's Relay for Life event. This is the first year I have participated in this event, and it has been an extremely rewarding experience.

The money raised will go to the American Cancer Society, an organization that is close to my heart, considering many of my family members have been affected by cancer. My aunt passed away at an early age in 2012 because of breast cancer. Since then, cancer-fighting efforts have been important in my life.

The efforts of my friends, family and coworkers to donate toward my cause has not only touched me, but also surprised me. It's heartwarming seeing a group of people come together to achieve a common goal.

So far, I have raised $345 of my $500 goal. Initially, I had tried to reach $100 but decided to up the ante. If you are interested in learning more about this event or would like to donate, you can visit Relay for Life.

Are You Experienced?

I took a walk to the liquor store over on South Catherine Street in search of something new. What I found was a unique and delicious-tasting wine called Deep Purple.

What attracted me to this wine was the label, created by cartoonist Bob Johnson.

"It is a tribute to a time when a group of ruggedly independent wine pioneers decided to get in touch with their inner deep purple," their website reads.

I love the '60s, so the wine reminded me of a Jimi Hendrix-looking album cover. And considering their logo is "Are you experienced?", that is probably what the company was going for.

Next time you're at the liquor store, give this a try. You won't be disappointed.

Fighting the Greek Life Stigma

This week, I wrote an article for Cardinal Points about the media's negative attention to Greek life. With several national headlines surfacing, including the Oklahoma University chapter of SAE's racist chant, it's difficult to pride yourself as a fraternity man — most people will call you a "frat boy."

But we're much more than that. We try our hardest to better ourselves and the world around us by taking part in community service and philanthropic activities. I didn't join Alpha Sigma Phi to drink and get high; I joined to make a difference in my community.

After a semester of being a member of this brotherhood, I have grown in many ways: I'm more confident in myself, responsible for my actions and have formed many new friendships. It's a decision I will never regret making.

Read my column here.