Charity Vogel: Commitment and need build ties
It’s lunchtime, and they’re hungry. Inside an Olive Garden restaurant on Maple Road in Amherst, the comfortable- looking pair sitting at a sunny window table ponders what to eat.
Bernie, 82, decides on his usual: soup and salad.
But Sean, 14, is pickier. He has a few questions before he can order.
“What’s — uh — ‘scallions’?” he asks, his head bent low over his menu.
“Scallions are onions,” Bernie says. “Sort of.”
“Oh. Nevermind.”
A waiter approaches the table, pencil poised. And with that — soup, salad, an order of chicken fingers — the biweekly lunch club that is Bernie Engel and Sean Konovitz rolls along in its normal fashion.
They aren’t doing much. It’s just lunch. From a few tables away, they probably look like a stately grandfather and strapping grandson: Bernie in his blue sportcoat and shiny black dress shoes, Sean with his Hardy Boy freckles and rumpled crewcut.
But looks are deceptive. These two might just be brightening the future of Buffalo.
Bernie, you see, is not related to Sean. They are joined by something less potent, but perhaps more meaningful than blood: Mutual commitment, built on need.
Bernie is a man who grew up in Buffalo, went to college, and in 1961 founded a successful collections company. He had it all: money, social position, a family. But his wife Estelle’s death in 1996, combined with his own retirement, made him face two hard truths: He had too much free time and he still felt the urge to contribute.
Enter Sean. Sean, who was 10 at the time, has always been a tightly wound kid. A straight-A student in his suburban district, he struggled for years to cope with social situations — even simple conversations. His mom, Susan, remembers him refusing to speak at all some days.
“He would just rock back and forth,” she recalls, pain in her eyes.
Susan sought help through an organization she’d heard good things about: Big Brothers Big Sisters. She wanted Sean to connect with somebody. Anybody.
That’s how Sean met Bernie, his unlikely angel.
And here’s where we can all learn a lesson.
Western New York has two big pools of untapped population right now. One is people over 55, including many retirees, who are past their career years but still have lots of energy, talent and wisdom.
The second pool is needy kids. In Buffalo, 43 percent of our children are living below the poverty line. These are desperate kids, needy in the most primal ways: For time. For attention. For advice. For love.
Problem is, these two groups don’t intersect all that often.
In particular, people over 55, especially men, often don’t volunteer because it doesn’t occur to them, or because they don’t think they are qualified. But qualifications don’t matter as much as just being there, said Alicia Bartsch at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Erie County, which paired 600 kids with adult mentors last year.
“It’s little things that make kids feel special,” she said. “For so many of these kids, those things are their firsts. Their first trip to Niagara Falls. Their first bike ride.”
Think about the math here. If we could harness the power of our wealth of retirees to the plight of our needy children, we might just put ourselves on the path to a brighter future.
Bernie and Sean, talking about life over Caesar salad and chicken fingers, show us what is possible.
An old man giving of his time. A young kid thirsty for connection.
If it can happen at the Olive Garden, it can happen anywhere.
