Measuring a year in 2 conversations, one in laughter, the other through tears

A year can be measured in baby showers and funerals, in trips taken or books read, in goals achieved or not. When I cast my mind back on the year now ending, I measure it in two conversations, months apart. Both were in Buffalo houses of worship, both dealt with faith and loss. One was lighthearted, the other shattering.

As we close the book on 2022, they won't leave me alone.

In late January, this first-time visitor was introduced to Buffalo with its heart wide open, the City of Good Neighbors. In mid-May, a second visit found the city's heart broken by hate.

I met The Rev. Bob Owczarczak at St. Bernadette Church in Orchard Park, just down Abbott Road from Highmark Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills, on Jan. 28. I was assigned to write about how Bills fans could continue to believe in their team, days after they had fallen in spectacular fashion to the Kansas City Chiefs.

I met The Rev. Julian Cook, pastor at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church on the East Side — just up the hill from the former site of War Memorial Stadium, the Bills' former home — on May 16, days after a body-armored 18-year-old with an assault weapon brought his racist hate to town, murder in his heart.

A pastor's pain: Comforting Buffalo's grieving East Side

After '13 seconds': Despite latest crushing loss, Bills fans still believe. Here's how

'Salt-of-the-earth kind of people'

“Father Bob” spoke of the blue-collar Bills and their blue-collar followers, how fans meet the team at the airport, win or lose, “just to let them know that we love them and we're here for them.” He talked about how Buffalonians live that good neighbor credo, 100%.

"We're salt-of-the-earth kind of people here," he told me. "We are the people that will shovel out each other's driveway. If your neighbor's sick, we'll cook meals and help out in any way that we can."

Then, the good neighbor Catholic priest — who ends his sermons with "Go, Bills" and happily donned a Bills jersey with "Father Bob" on the back — did the good neighborly thing. He called friends and fellow fans who all agreed to meet to explain why they continue to believe in a football team that has known so many epic losses that they give them names: Wide Right, 13 Seconds.

Like Owczarczak, they were thoughtful about their fandom, and laughed about their undying love for their team.

Their unflagging faith made me believe in Buffalo, wings and all.

106 days later

On a Saturday afternoon 106 days later, at the Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue on Buffalo’s East Side — an area that is largely Black, mostly poor, and untouched by civic improvement — a white supremacist with hate in his heart traveled hundreds of miles to murder Black people as they shopped for birthday cakes and hot dogs and barbecue charcoal.

Ten people were killed; three were injured.

Editors dispatched me, once again, to Western New York. As I neared Buffalo on the New York State Thruway, I noticed a sign.

Welcome to Buffalo, an All America City.

Not “All-American,” as I misread it at the time, but “All America,” as in the winner of a civic-engagement award from the National Civic League. The Buffalo/Niagara area won the distinction in 2002; the Greater Buffalo Area in 1996.

I got to work. I interviewed the son of Aaron Salter Jr., the Tops security guard and former Buffalo motorcycle cop who fired at the killer and saved many lives before losing his own. I talked to dozens of people, bystanders and onlookers.

I had a long talk with a bus driver named Tommy Seay, who grew up on Riley, before Tops came to the East Side, when Jefferson was a humming avenue of Black life and commerce. When he was younger, he was in a singing group with one of the Tops victims, Heyward Patterson. Tommy broke into song to prove it — he can still sing.

Healing the Harm: Watch a documentary about forces for good on the East Side

Before long, I was standing before Pastor Cook, the young senior pastor at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. The day before our interview, Cook had invited political and faith leaders to Macedonia for a vigil. They'd all shown up.

Gov. Kathy Hochul was there, and New York Attorney General Tish James, and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, and faith leaders of every stripe and persuasion. There were more white people, Cook said, than had ever been in the big brick church before. Promises were made from Cook’s pulpit to never forget, to rebuild and invest in the East Side.

While we spoke, Pastor Cook sat in a pew behind that same pulpit where those with the power had stood. I began by mentioning that misremembered Thruway sign.

But to my surprise, I found it hard to get out my question. Tears came, my voice cracked, emotion cratered my composure. Buffalo's pain became my pain. And it all became too much.

"This tragedy ... makes Buffalo ... an all-American city," I said haltingly. "Can you speak to that?"

I apologized for the unprofessional display, but the young pastor wouldn't hear of it, putting me at ease with the same calming voice he had used days earlier with families learning their loved ones had perished at Tops.

Yes, he said. At the meeting the day before, Rabbi Sobel from Temple Beth Zion had read a list of American cities that have experienced a mass shooting, "and now Buffalo is among those cities where hatred became so clear and apparent."

'Endless threats'

The hatred hadn't ended when the shooting stopped.

"There were threats," he said. "Endless threats."

Cook said he didn't think the vigil with the politicians and faith leaders was a safe place to bring his toddler son.

"Think about that," he said. "The pastor left his 20-month-old at home because I was afraid that, ‘Hey, there may be something that happens at this church because we're all here.’”

Cook, a Chicago transplant who had been at Macedonia just four years, said the East Side had been abandoned, and not just by the Bills, who moved to the greener, cleaner pastures of suburban Orchard Park decades ago.

Businesses shuttered in droves. It took decades of lobbying to convince Tops to open its store on Jefferson. It became a vital East Side hub, an oasis in a food desert. Now, the massacre had taken even that away, the young pastor said, his voice rising.

“If I cannot shop at the one grocery store that exists in my community, where in the world can I go, where white supremacy cannot interrupt my life, disrupt my life, change or end my life?” he wondered.

In a year of interviews and quotes and stories, that quote is seared in my memory.

Faith journey takes them elsewhere

Because these conversations have echoed through the months, I reached out to Cook and Owczarczak, to reconnect. It turns out that, as 2023 dawns, neither is where he was when last we spoke.

In June, Owczarczak was transferred 40 miles south, to Holy Trinity Church in Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie, where he was named parish administrator. When I reached him again, after he had said daily Mass, he said the Tops shooting was heart-wrenching and personal to him.

From 2006 to 2013, before he joined the priesthood, he was a trauma counselor and clinical social worker on the East Side, doing home visits. He shopped at the Tops on Jefferson. He learned about the shooting while conducting a couples retreat. His brother, a doctor, texted him, asking for his prayers, as his hospital was expected to receive the wounded.

"My heart just melted," he said. "Just think about the hate. It was someone basically coming into our loving community — it's not a perfect community, at all — but spreading hate."

In October, five months after the massacre, Cook was named senior pastor at Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church in Cincinnati.

Leaving Macedonia "was an incredibly tough decision, made even more tough by the events of May 14," he said.

"So much of my heart is still in that space because when you go through trauma of that kind, there is a bond that cannot be broken," he said.

Not so, he said, with those pulpit promises from the powerful: never forget, invest, rebuild. Cook said he's not confident those promises will be kept.

"The residents of the East Side of Buffalo will never forget. But there are entities and folks who make a difference on the East Side of Buffalo, powerful entities who made promises to make an impact on the East Side of Buffalo but have not made the sustained type of contributions that that community needs," he said.

"If all of the promises had been gathered in a bucket and poured out on the East Side of Buffalo," Cook said, "that community ought to look very different today. And it doesn't look very different."

Approaching the new year, Owczarczak finds inspiration in a quote he credits to, of all things, the animated film "Kung Fu Panda."

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today's a gift. And that's why we call it the present.

"One of the biggest things is living in the present," he said, from his new church in Dunkirk. "Even though we grieve the loss of life and we have a hole in our heart for all the loved ones we have lost, we have hope that if we lead a good life, we can see them again in heaven and we can have eternal life with them. We try to be the best version of ourselves that we can be each and every day."

Cook approaches the new year with a goal.

"My faith is looking for feet," he said. "Our faith can be no more valuable than what it produces in the world. God needs hands and feet in the world."

Peter D. Kramer has been a staff member for 34 years. Follow him on Twitter @peterkramer.

This article originally appeared on New York State Team: Talking Buffalo, in 2 conversations held in laughter and tears