Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck lived a mere two blocks apart in Manhattan’s midtown, but they inhabited entirely different worlds. A 35-year old executive, Schroff enjoyed the trappings of financial success in a luxury hi-rise while 11-year old Mazyck was barely surviving in a shelter hotel. When their paths crossed on Sept. 1, 1986, Mazyck had not eaten in two days.
“Excuse me lady, but do you have any spare change? I am hungry,” he asked her. Though Schroff initially rebuffed him, she returned moments later to offer him not money but a meal. A moment of attention and care bloomed into a friendship spanning 25 years (and counting) that has transformed both their lives.
Schroff and Mazyck were at the Westport Public Library Thursday afternoon to speak about “An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-year old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny,” Schroff’s New York Times bestselling memoir (co-written with Alex Tresniowski) of the story that has inspired others to give of and for themselves.
Seated side-by-side, Schroff and Mazyck each took a turn sharing their story before taking questions from the audience.
“I never would have realized back in 1986,” Schroff began, “that this would be the journey that was planned for us,” noting that the pair celebrated the 25th anniversary of their friendship last September (the book was released two months later). In the moment that she decided to turn back, Schroff explained, “what resonated with me was that he was hungry” and “his trusting eyes.” As she spoke, Mazyck turned those eyes on the audience, eliciting laughter and agreement. Schroff continued that she did not feel comfortable giving him money because he was an 11-year old child, but she offered to take him for lunch.
“We met every week for four years and hundreds of times after,” said Schroff, who believes both the meeting and the ensuing book were destined, pointing to a string of circumstances too ordered to be in her view coincidental.
The child of an alcoholic father who could be volatile and abusive, Schroff would come to identify with aspects of Mazyck’s chaotic childhood. She longed for the family she didn’t have while Mazyck longed for a mother who could love him the way he needed to be loved. Both expressed that their relationship grew as a mutual friendship. Schroff did not adopt Mazyck, and he spoke lovingly of his mother, whose drug addiction prevented her from caring for him, emphasizing that he would never have left her “unless the state took me away.”
As Schroff and her co-writer Tresniowski were working on the book, they tried to find a teacher who had positively impacted Mazyck only to learn she had retired. Searches for her turned up empty, but the teacher was still working as a substitute, and she reconnected with Mazyck when she found herself teaching one of his daughters’ classes. The title for the book—“An Invisible Thread,” a reference to a Chinese proverb that asserts an invisible thread connects us to those we are destined to meet regardless of our circumstances—appeared on a greeting card when she was shopping for a friend’s birthday just as she and Tresniowski were preparing to send out their book proposal and were struggling to find the right title.
Mazyck, who is married with seven children and runs a construction company, wasn’t sure he wanted the story to be told, partly because he didn’t want to expose his children to the life he wanted to leave behind and partly because he “didn’t think anyone would want to read it.”
“I didn’t think we did anything special,” he said. “But Laura did something special. She saved my life.”
“What Laura didn’t tell you,” Mazyck said, “is that it was maybe 12:30 or 1 when we first met, and we didn’t go our separate ways until about 7:30.”
After lunch, they went for a walk and talked, stopping along the way at an arcade and for ice cream. Schroff gave him her card, but Mazyck didn’t have money to make phone calls, so he threw the card away. A few days later, again having gone without food, he returned to the same corner hoping to run into “the nice lady,” and they found each other. She took him back to McDonalds, and they agreed to meet every Monday. The ritual continued weekly for the next four years, with the dinners moving to other restaurants and eventually to Schroff’s apartment.
“A man once told me, ‘you’ll never live to see the age of 18,’ and I believed him,” said Mazyck, who added that drugs and violence had been part of his world for as long as he could remember. “Laura showed me another life.”
Schroff took Mazyck to visit her family in the suburbs, his first trip outside of the city. As they drove home, she asked him what had made the biggest impression on him—the grass or the swing set or playing with other children, perhaps? Mazyck replied, “the table.” In his home, the refrigerator contained only baking soda and water “for making drugs.” But with Schroff’s family, he discovered that a whole room could be devoted to dining together, to listening to each other’s stories, and to love.
“The table represented the love of a family,” Mazyck explained, adding that in that moment, he realized he wanted to grow up and have a family and a dining room of his own. “That was the first time I began to imagine myself as an adult.” He continued, “I don’t have a living room in my house, but I have a dining room, a big table that seats 12 people where we can sit, eat, and talk together.”
When asked what impact she hoped her book might make, Schroff talked about emails she has received from readers who found themselves in a position to care and, inspired by her book, acted on it. Among the examples was a reader who told Schroff of being at the supermarket behind a woman and her family who couldn’t pay for their groceries: “I thought about your book,” he wrote, “and I paid for the groceries.”
Excuses or, if you prefer, explanations, for why we cannot connect across our differences abound, but Schroff and Mazyck’s story glowed with mutual respect, love, and an absence of judgment about the other’s life. Each found something crucial in the other.
Though Schroff repeatedly asserted, “This was the journey that was planned for us,” and it’s easy to believe this if you don’t believe in accidents, what came through just as powerfully was that each had a strong will to survive and to build a beautiful life. And both were open to receiving what was offered to them, whether by fate or chance.
The lesson of their story is timeless: a reminder to be present in the world, to remain awake to those around us, to the threads that connect us, and that what seems like a simple act of care can flourish, changing all involved.