From Client, to Friend, to Family: My Uncle Richard
For National Charity Day, a story about the transformative powers of giving back
By Anne Roderique-Jones
My husband and I moved to New York City in 2007, leaving behind our entire family and circle of friends. We came from the Ozark Mountains with all our belongings crammed into a U-Haul: a massive antique armoire, stacks of books, and my husband’s flimsy graduation robe. I spent the entire 1,200-mile ride trying to quell the cat’s incessant meowing and nurse a dog that gets carsick. After twenty hours, we must have looked like a modern-day version of the Clampett’s chugging into the Upper East Side. We were frazzled and frantic, fearing that might set the tone for our next chapter.
This was our sliding doors moment. We both grew up in Southern Missouri and planned to have the idealized domestic life: a house with a two-car garage, a couple of kids, and an annual week-long vacation to Florida. Shortly after we were married and ready to put an offer on an upgraded home that “we could grow into,” I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, with a pit in my stomach I could no longer ignore. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pass the time wallpapering a forever home, registering for a diaper genie, and filling the house with children. The life we’d signed up for was a life we weren't sure we wanted.
So, we moved to New York City with barely any money, trying to navigate new careers. The one-year marker in the city can make or break you, and it was close to snapping us in two. We didn’t have a solid friend group; we missed our family.
My husband and I spent our first Christmas alone in an uptown restaurant with white tablecloths, and I fought back tears as families around us exchanged gifts and affection.
It was around this time that I decided to volunteer. A New York City-based organization called God’s Love We Deliver was just around the corner from my office in Soho. (It’s not a religious outfit as the name would imply; the nonprofit organization was forced to change its name from Meals on Heels and somehow settled on GLWD.) During my lunch break, my job was to peddle hot meals to those living with a critical illness. This volunteer work revealed the part of New York City I’d always dreamed about—filled with interesting characters, stories, and human connections—but it also began to repair the hole in my heart from the family I was missing.
My dad died of an overdose just a few months before we left for New York. It was sudden and heartbreaking and made me feel like an adult for the first time. I was supposed to be picking out draperies and custom cabinetry, but instead, I was selecting funeral hymns and casket liners. My father was single, and I was his primary caretaker, bringing Lean Cuisines on my lunch break and ushering him to doctor appointments. Our relationship had been messy and complicated, yet it was fueled by love. The loss sent a shockwave of grief, but perhaps the most difficult part was admitting that I’d been given a gift: freedom and a newfound appreciation for life.
Through GLWD, I met Natalie in her airy Soho apartment, the nonagenarian woman who reminded me of my grandmother but with a thick Brooklyn accent. There was the woman who lived in a six-floor walk-up—a chain smoker who smelled like my Aunt Phyllis. And then there was Richard, the same age as my father, but nothing like the loud and boisterous man I grew up with, who favored day drinking and would blast Journey at top volume while driving around in his LeBaron convertible. Hailing from Staten Island and a resident of the same brownstone apartment on McDougal since 1988, Richard was a first-generation Italian with a penchant for opera, Christmas decorations, and talking smack about Barbara Streisand (“She’s so full of herself!”)
Richard started as my GLWD client but quickly moved into friend territory. He had also suffered loss—his longtime partner and, more recently, his brother. We were both more than a little lonely. We’d sip wine on his stoop while he told me about old New York, back when he danced at Studio 54. He described what his neighborhood was like years before Girls started filming on the block. Richard sometimes cooked dinner for my husband and me. When I was no longer able to volunteer on my lunch break, we spoke on the phone each week. We needed each other.
Richard didn’t use email or have a cell phone when I met him, but the inevitable emergence of technology slowly started to creep into his life. He’d call me to inquire about a particular exhibit at the Whitney and would delight in the fact that I could magically procure the answer in a matter of seconds. I became his de facto secretary, providing information with the click of a mouse. “What is Sophia Loren’s given name?” “When does the Halston movie come out?” “Did you know that our new mayor is a woman?” It was almost as if he wanted to test the limits of online information. “Find me a two-for-one Indian dinner in Chelsea!” he’d bark. The World Wide Web was a portal to all that his city had to offer.
My husband and I eventually met new friends.
New York City is the kind of place that takes a bit longer, and you have to try a little harder, but ultimately, you’ll be rewarded with a fiercely loyal squad that feels like family.
We thrived in our careers, traveled around the world, and made our tiny apartment a home. Richard got a flip-phone and would leave me five-minute-long voicemails and sign each of his text messages with: “Love, Richard.”
Richard eventually moved out of his brownstone apartment and now lives in a doorman building, but still below 14th Street; I live with my husband on the Upper East Side, which he refers to as the suburbs. He doesn’t mind taking the four train uptown for dinner, but we’ll often call him a car service instead. Once a New York City taxi driver, Richard is positively enchanted when we call him a Lyft, delivering a full report once inside his apartment. I follow his route via the app’s geolocator and can’t go to bed until I know he’s home safely.
I often struggle to describe my relationship with Richard. He went from a client to a friend, to a sort of surrogate father to me. We met at a time when we both needed each other. I care for him how I cared for my father, but our relationship is not messy or complicated. Unlike a real parent, there are no perceived roles we must play in each other’s lives.
We’ve settled on “Uncle Richard.”
I remember one balmy summer evening: Uncle Richard came uptown for a Southern dinner of homemade macaroni and cheese, Boudin sausage, collard greens, and banana pudding. As we sat on the balcony, drinking a glass of wine, he told me about my neighborhood. It was once primarily German, and few remnants of the past remain. The residents in our building often complain about the newly built high-rise across the street: a towering structure that blocks the skyline, with the ground-floor supermarket offering a concert of constant noise. But Richard was enraptured by this window into our neighbor’s lives, speculating what they might be having for dinner or when the next naked person would emerge from the bathroom. To him, New York City was still exciting, if not a little different than it once was. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for a surrogate family: it may not be the structure we’re familiar with, but it can be beautiful nevertheless.
September 5, 2023
Anne Roderique-Jones is a New York City-based journalist whose work has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. Anne is the writer and host of the podcast, Ozarks True Crime, in production with editaudio, and is certified in trauma reporting. She's currently researching and reporting on the third season of the podcast.