Alphabet City 7: Alphabet City, #7

By Jamell Crouthers

Tiffani grew up in Alphabet City with aspirations of making this community better. She starts a juice shop to promote a healthy lifestyle and bring people together through her connections. What she soon learns is that the community she's lived in all of her life is built on putting people in their graves sooner than the average person. Fast food restaurants, liquor stores, funeral homes, cheap clothing stores and bodegas are all that's around her. While she fights to grow her business and thrive, there are people telling her to pack it up and go to the suburbs. The question is will she give up on her community or fight to get people to make healthier choices so they live longer. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jamell Crouthers
• Release date: Jul 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201405953

Jamell Crouthers

Jamell Crouthers started writing at the age of 13, it wasn't until his 30s where he realized he could impact others with his writing. Jamell was able to incorporate a prose format and social issues and be able to write books on what's going on in the world today. Writing about social issues is something that Jamell is very concerned about and his writing journey has allowed him to write books on various subjects. His goal is to change the world one book at a time.

Book preview

Loss of Life

I remember the day I found out my father died,

It was heartbreaking and I was speechless.

I remember leaving for work early in the morning,

I left before everyone else woke up for the day.

The phone call came from my mother and she was sobbing,

I knew something bad happened and she said my dad didn’t wake up.

My mother kept screaming Tiffani on the phone as she tried to formulate words,

I was just waiting for her to confirm what happened.

I’d later find out that he had a massive heart attack in his sleep,

The autopsy confirmed it and I was a mess for a long time.

Sleepless nights, insomnia, I was heartbroken for so long,

The funeral was a blur as I was trying to keep it together.

I was a daddy’s girl and I was trying for the longest time to change his eating habits.

Unhealthy food consisting of red meat, fast food and junk daily,

He had been doing it for the majority of his life and he was stubborn.

His doctor told him that he needed to change his lifestyle,

That he was heading down a dangerous path of potentially dying.

My parents never ate good food consistently as they cooked sometimes,

It was me making a decision to change my eating habits.

As a child, I ate a lot of fast food as my parents worked so much,

I was one of very few children who had both of their parents in the home.

It was a rarity and I was surely a lucky child to have their mother and father there everyday,

There was jealousy from my friends at times but they didn’t know the battles I had with my parents.

The fights I had with them as a teenager telling them I wanted home cooked food,

That fast food wasn’t sitting right in my body and I felt sick after eating it a lot of times.

My research led me to juicing and I started buying myself things,

I bought myself a juicer so I can have my drinks daily.

As a teenager, I wanted my own money so I worked part-time,

It allowed me to learn about money and not depend on my parents.

After my father’s funeral, I knew that I would be a different woman,

Heart disease ran in my family and it’s surely not hereditary.

It was something that a lot of family members dealt with,

Aunts, uncles, older cousins and even my grandparents.

There was a goal of changing that in my generation of children,

Between my first, second cousins and I, we needed to make better eating choices.

This was partly why I knew I wanted to change the landscape of my life,

My father’s death was a contributing factor to opening my juice shop.

My family was affected by my father’s death and I wanted to honor him,

Making him proud and so many others