Chipping Away at a List of Goals, and Bonding Over Cupcakes
Version 0 of 1. Andie Gratereaux sat under the autumn leaves at DeSalvio Playground in Manhattan a year ago, peeled away the wrapper from a salted caramel cupcake and started to put her life back together. With the help of a mentor she had met that day, Andie, 12, started a list in a spiral notebook of what she wanted to do over the coming year. Visit a park, try to sew, play music, learn to bake, go ice skating. The list became a road map for a girl uprooted from her home in Virginia after her stepfather threw her and her mother, Arlene Gratereaux, out of the house one night in 2011. He did so during one of his fits of rage, episodes during which he would get so angry he would punch holes in the apartment walls that Ms. Gratereaux covered with her daughter’s drawings. Ms. Gratereaux’s brother drove from Manhattan that night to Petersburg, Va., near Richmond, and took mother and daughter immediately back to his place on the Lower East Side. They were safe then, but they had left everything behind. Without a permanent home, Ms. Gratereaux and Andie have shuffled since then between her brother’s apartment and her parents’ place in the East New York section of Brooklyn. They were not used to this lifestyle, especially Andie. It led Ms. Gratereaux to Catholic Big Brothers and Big Sisters, an affiliate of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. She worried about their depressing circumstances and thought Andie needed a mentor, someone who could show her a world that seemed beyond her grasp. Andie was matched with Darragh Wright, 33, who had turned to Big Brothers and Big Sisters about the same time. “I was looking for a way to get connected to the New York community in a long-term way,” Ms. Wright, who grew up in Atlanta, said. At DeSalvio Playground, Ms. Wright decided to break the ice over cupcakes. Together, she and Andie worked on the list of goals, and Ms. Wright snapped a photograph of it with her phone so that she would always have it with her. In the year that followed, she would refer to that photo to cross items off the list. She and Andie traveled to Garrison, N.Y., where they hiked in Arden Point State Park. “We had sore feet at the end,” Ms. Wright said. Andie sewed, making two blankets for homeless people as part of a community service project. And she got to bake — banana bread. “My uncle took two helpings,” she said. Ms. Wright and Andie see each other every other weekend, and their meetings start with a game of three questions. On a brisk afternoon in Prospect Park in Brooklyn a few days before Halloween, as children in princess and Spiderman costumes roamed around, Ms. Wright retrieved her questions for Andie from a plastic bag in her purse. What is your favorite food? (Cheeseburger with fries and ketchup.) What is your favorite day of the year? (Her birthday. Ms. Wright’s is Thanksgiving.) They also discussed Andie’s Halloween costume. (A zombie bride, with black eyes, a pale face and bloodied lips.) Then and now, the questions are never too serious. They do not discuss the trip Andie and her mother must make every week from the Lower East Side to East New York to stay for the weekend. They do not talk about the stress weighing on Ms. Gratereaux, a 34-year-old college graduate who most recently found work as a poll worker on Election Day and is receiving job training through Grace Institute, another program affiliated with Catholic Charities. Instead, Andie uses the time as an escape, a chance to become more independent, her mother said. Those moments, along with the aid the family is receiving elsewhere, have started to help them rebuild their lives. Catholic Charities also provided the family with $360 from the Neediest Cases Fund so that Andie could purchase her first laptop. She and her mother spend many hours after school at the library so that Andie can complete her computer-based homework. Andie also has lessons when she is with Ms. Wright. On the October day in Prospect Park, they got up from under a tree, and Ms. Wright handed Andie her phone with Google Maps open on it. They wanted to get a cup of hot cocoa, but it was up to Andie to navigate. “Andie, you lead us,” Ms. Wright said, bending over to look at the phone. “Can you find east? Show me on the map.” Andie shuffled into position and began to walk. “Learning your way around a map is an important thing,” Ms. Wright said as they reversed course after a wrong turn under a bridge. The young girl looked back at the map, and they made their way out of the park. Soon, they would return to another park, the playground in Manhattan where their friendship was forged, to mark their one-year anniversary. “We’ll do the cupcake thing again,” Andie said. Ms. Wright agreed. “And we’ll make another list,” she said. |