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I Got 47 Riders Out Of Bed Before Breakfast To Walk One 10-Year-Old Into School. I'm not his father. I'm not his uncle or his godfather or anything you'd find written down on a form at that school. I live 2 doors down from him on Harlan. That's all I am to that boy. It was enough for one morning, and nowhere near enough after that. My name's Gus Marek. I'm 64 years old and I've been riding 40 years. Last April I was out front dragging my trash bin back up the drive when Dana came out of her house and sat down on her own lawn. She went straight past the porch step. Down onto the grass, in the middle of the yard, in the clothes she works in. So I walked over. She had both hands over her face and she was trying to push words out around them. It took her 3 tries. "Robbie told me at breakfast that he'd rather not wake up than walk into that school again," she said into her hands. He's 10 years old. There were 2 older boys at Halstead Elementary who'd made a project out of him since Christmas. The school had spoken to them. It kept happening anyway, wherever nobody was standing. Dana had already been up to that office twice. She's a receptionist at a dental practice and she takes her lunch at 12:15, and both of those meetings cost her a lunch and got her a form. And Robbie's father died a year ago last spring. Since then that kid had gotten small. Small in how he came into a room. He used to be the boy who told you a fact about sharks before you got your coat off. He'd stopped doing that. I didn't say anything wise to Dana on that lawn. I asked her what time the bell rang. I couldn't do a thing about 2 boys in a hallway. I could do something about what that hallway looked like with a row of men standing outside it. So I went in the house and made 5 phone calls. They weren't a speech. I gave each man the boy's name and the time that bell rang. Nobody asked me anything else. Every man I called made calls of his own, and by 9 that night I had 47 confirmed for Thursday morning, most of them men who'd never set foot in Colvin. Wednesday evening I knocked on Dana's door and asked if Robbie would come out. He did, and he stood behind the door frame with about half of himself showing. I got down on the step so his eyes were above mine. I told him I was the smallest kid in my class until I was 14. I said I used to take the long way home from school so I wouldn't have to walk past a certain corner. He looked at me like I was making it up. So I said it plainer. I told him the old man on his step used to be the kid behind the door, and that I just got bigger and older, and that he would too. Then I told him some men were coming by in the morning and all he had to do was walk. He asked, "How many?" I said, "Enough." They came up Harlan at 7:00. You could hear them from the school parking lot. Dana stood in her doorway with a hand over her mouth and didn't move for a full minute. Robbie came out onto the step and stopped dead, and I watched a 10-year-old start counting. He got somewhere around 20 and quit. Then he walked. He walked between 2 rows of men all the way to the front doors of that school, and 47 of us watched a small boy get taller by the step. Somebody's mother filmed it on her phone. That's the part people know. It went everywhere. People I hadn't spoken to since high school sent it back to me, and a man in Arizona mailed me a letter. The part nobody knows happened 3 months later, at a kitchen table, over a bowl of cereal. The escort didn't fix anything on its own. What fixed things was the next morning. And the one after that. For a week there were 3 or 4 of us walking him in. Then 2. Then most mornings it was just me, on foot. No engine, and nobody watching. It's 4 blocks from Harlan to those front doors, and after I dropped him I'd go home and have my coffee. That routine did more for that boy than the 47 of us did in 6 minutes, and nobody filmed a single morning of it. By June he was telling me facts about sharks the entire way there. Which is how I ended up at Dana's table on a Saturday in July with a bowl of cereal in front of me and Robbie across from me doing arithmetic. He said, "My dad was 41." I said I knew. His father went down on the kitchen floor one morning with a heart attack that nobody saw coming. No warning. No history that anybody knew about. He'd had a physical the year before and they'd told him there was nothing to worry about at 41. Robbie stirred his cereal and didn't look up at me. He said, "How old are you?" I said, "64." I watched him do the math, and I watched it land on his face. He said, "So who walks me in after you?" I've handed people hard answers my whole life. I've told men things about themselves that cost me their company for a good 13 years afterward. I didn't have one for a 10-year-old holding a spoon. I said something. I don't remember what it was. Whatever it was, it wasn't true. Because here's what was actually sitting at that table. I'm 64. I've eaten breakfast in a diner most mornings of my adult life. I hadn't been on an exam table since I was 52 years old. And a boy who has already buried one man was across from me running the numbers on the next one, and I was the only person at that table who had never bothered to look at mine. I called Dr. Ferris's office on Monday morning. They had a cancellation on Thursday, which meant I was out of excuses. Blood pressure, blood work, the whole tour. She called me 4 days later. My LDL came back at 184. I asked her what that meant in plain English. She said, "High." Then she said the word a second time, slower. "High." At 64, in a man who'd never had it measured. She asked whether anybody in my family had heart trouble. I said I didn't know. Then I sat out in the truck and finished Robbie's arithmetic for him. A 41-year-old man 2 doors down from me was told there was nothing to worry about, and then he died on his own kitchen floor. I'm 64 with a number he probably never had, and I've got a kid who'll be waiting on my step at 7:40 when that bell rings again. Dr. Ferris offered me a prescription and I told her I'd take it if she wanted me on it. Then she offered me something better. "I'll give you 90 days to move that number yourself," she said, "if you'll actually do the work instead of nodding at me in the office and eating the same breakfast on Monday." I took the 90 days. I told her why I wanted them. She listened, and then she wrote something in my chart I could read upside down. She wrote motivated. I thought that was funny. I went home and started looking things up on my phone. I put the phone down and called Dutch instead. Dutch is 68. He was an Army medic, and he's the man in our club everybody phones before they phone a doctor, which is its own kind of problem. I told him my number and I told him about the boy. He asked me one question. He asked what the dead man's number had been. I said nobody knew, but the physical hadn't turned anything up. Dutch said that's the part nobody ever sits you down and explains. "That number on your sheet is a headcount," he said. It's a straight count of how many of those LDL particles I've got in me, and a count doesn't say a word about their condition. "I've spent 20 years watching men my own age go down carrying charts their doctors were happy with," he said. He asked me what I'd been doing about it instead. I said, "Green tea, going on 17 years." "Green tea's famous molecule is EGCG," he said, "and oolong starts life as the same leaf." The difference is what gets done to it after it's picked. When they oxidize an oolong leaf on purpose, 2 of those EGCG units get welded together into a bigger molecule that green tea doesn't have and can't have. It's called oolonghomobisflavan A, and Dutch told me to go look the name up myself. So my green tea years were never going to hand me that molecule, whatever else they were or weren't doing, because a green leaf doesn't get oxidized and no oxidizing means no weld. And the welded one is the one they went and tested. "They took human LDL in a dish and went after it several different ways," he said, "then ran the same attacks again with that oolong molecule added in." Fewer burnt fats came out of it, and the protein wrapper around the particle held together, on every route they tried. "A lab dish isn't a man," he said, before I could open my mouth. It's why people call him. "They've run oolong catechins in people as well," he said. They ran it blinded and placebo-controlled over 12 weeks, and the blood measures moved in the right direction, though that was a concentrated drink and not a bag off a supermarket shelf. That molecule gets built by the processing. Which means the processing is the thing you're actually paying for. And most of what gets sold as oolong in this country is dust in a bag. What I drink every morning now is PiPi Tea. Whole leaf, 4 grams to a bag, grown at altitude, and the testing gets done by a lab with no stake in the answer. 187 milligrams of EGCG in a cup, and 340 milligrams of total polyphenols. The threshold the research keeps landing on is around 150 milligrams a day. A supermarket bag gets you about 12. Decent whole leaf off a shelf gets you about 44. The dust that fills most of the boxes on that shelf is where that 12 comes from. One cup every morning. Water off the boil, 3 to 5 minutes. Dutch made me do one more thing, and it's the thing I'd have you do before you buy anything from anybody. There's a test that looks at the condition of those particles instead of counting them, and any walk-in lab will run it for you. No doctor's note. You give them an arm and they hand you a card. It cost me an hour on a Saturday. Mine came back at 66. The lab prints the reference range right there on the card. Under 60. So I was over it, on a morning when I felt completely fine. Nobody ever ran that test on Robbie's father. His headcount came back clean. I drank the tea every morning for 90 days. I also walked a 10-year-old up 4 blocks on most of those mornings, which I'd have been doing either way. Then I went back to the lab, and then I went back to Dr. Ferris. LDL 184 down to 160. The oxidized number, 66 down to 53. I've had that one measured 2 times in 64 years, and the second time it came in under. Dr. Ferris cared about the first number. I was there for the second one. The last of those 4 blocks goes uphill. In April, Robbie got to those front doors about half a block ahead of me every morning, and he'd stand there waiting on me without ever mentioning it. By the end of those 90 days I was going up that last hill next to him, still talking. I asked Dutch how much of that was the tea. "Some of it's 90 mornings of walking a hill," he said, "and neither of us gets to say which." I'm telling you what happened to me, not what caused it. Dr. Ferris laid both sheets side by side and asked me what I'd changed. I told her about the tea and about the hill. She didn't write me a prescription that day. She said, "Come back in 90 days and we'll look again." Then she asked me for the name of that second test, and I wrote it on the back of her own card. Robbie drew me something back in April. It's 47 stick figures in 2 rows outside a school, and about a third of them have beards, and he got the shape of it exactly right. It's been on my refrigerator since the day he handed it over. When the second card came back from the lab I taped it up next to the drawing. Then I walked down the street and got him and brought him into my kitchen and let him read it. He read the numbers out loud. He asked me what the little letters after 53 meant. I told him I'd had to ask that too. Then he asked me what the next one was going to be. I told him we'd find out in 90 days. He asked me for the date. He wrote it on the back of the drawing in pencil, and it's still sitting there. Robbie's father's name was Kevin. He was 41 years old. He had a physical the year before he died and it turned up nothing, and nobody looked at the condition of anything. I've spent 40 years being one of the men you call when what you need is bodies standing in a parking lot. 47 engines can carry a boy through a door he's frightened of. I watched it work. It took 6 minutes and it changed the way that kid walks into a building. Not one of them can carry the man he expects to find on that step next September. That part happens in a kitchen, in the dark. It's a kettle and a bag and about 4 minutes, and nobody films that one. You have to stay alive to keep showing up. Nobody ever put it to me that way. I was 64 years old before a boy with a spoon in his hand explained it to me. Robbie has 8 school years left in front of him. I intend to be standing on that step for a good many of them. If you're the one everybody phones, go and get your own card. And go and look hard at what's in your cup. https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp-nm P.S. There's a 90-day money-back guarantee on it. That's the same window Dr. Ferris gave me, and the one that sits between my 2 lab cards. Drink a cup every morning for 90 days, then go and get retested. If nothing has moved, ask them for your money back. P.P.S. If you're a mother reading this, and your kid has already lost more than a kid is built to lose, the men will show up. Most of them are terrible at it. They'll stand in your driveway with their hands in their pockets and say the wrong thing about your husband. Let them come anyway. Dana let 47 strangers into the worst month of that year, and one of them is still walking her boy to school. And when one of them tells you he's fine, ask him what number he's got on his refrigerator. He isn't fine. None of us are. P.P.P.S. There's a drawing and a lab card on my refrigerator and a 10-year-old who reads both of them. Go find a walk-in lab near you and order the oxidized LDL test yourself. You don't need a referral for it. Whatever that card comes back saying, put it up where the people who are counting on you can read it. P.P.P.P.S. They run a buy 2, get 1 free on the boxes, which is how I buy it now. One of them goes to Dana's kitchen, because there's a 10-year-old in that house who keeps track of dates now. https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp-nm