31 Aug News from Experienced Goods September 2022

Since the advent of social media, many of us have reconnected with people from our pasts: childhood friends, old flames, mentors and teachers we may not have properly thanked when we went charging off to slay the dragons of our youth.  It’s a wonderous thing to reach out to a long-lost someone and then see their responding message in your inbox, and a risky one; sometimes the reply is joyous, excited, and sometimes there is anger and buried resentment bubbling to the surface. The proverbial double-edged sword. When I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I had a friend named Rebecca with whom I was very close. We saw each other through marriages and divorces and were always there for each other to talk, laugh, cry, eat food, go to hear music, share a bottle of wine.  She managed a bluegrass band and I went to many of their gigs, Rebecca and I driving home in the wee hours, stopping to buy frozen mac and cheese to cook and eat in the kitchen of my tiny apartment, she sleeping on my couch because she lived an hour away high up in the mountains.  She was my hero when it came to good humor, strength and resourcefulness in the face of loss and hardship.

When I left Boulder to move to Vermont in 1994, she was pregnant with her daughter who was born a month after I arrived here; we stayed in touch by letter for a while, and she and her 2-year-old came out to Vermont for my wedding in 1996. I saw her again a few years later when I visited Boulder, and then we lost touch.  I tried many times to contact her, calling, emailing, eventually becoming friends on Facebook with her now adult daughter, asking her for Rebecca’s current phone numbers and trying to reach her that way, but she never responded.  I thought maybe I had hurt or offended her somehow, and decided to stop pursuing her out of respect for her privacy. Then recently her daughter’s birthday popped up in my Facebook notifications, and I risked trying to reach her one more time by texting her.  To my amazement, she texted me back, thrilled to hear from me, apologizing for the long gap in communication, and full of stories of her new life with her husband in Nebraska. We made a plan to talk by phone and had a 2-½ hour conversation on a warm Sunday afternoon, both of us so happy to hear each other’s voices again and stumbling through the momentous task of filling in more than 20 years of lives lived.

Sometimes people come back into our lives whom we’ve relegated to the past, and sometimes those reconnections feel like you are just picking up the thread of a conversation that was put on pause for a while.  We’ve recently welcomed back to Experienced Goods three lovely ladies who volunteered at the front desk for many years: Veronica, Jackie and Mary.  Veronica and Jackie work together as a team on Tuesday mornings, and Mary takes over the afternoon shift.  When we reopened in July of 2020 after the 4-month Covid-19 lockdown, we decided to maximize everyone’s safety by not asking our volunteers to come back and by relegating their duties to staff members. We made that work for the following two years, and then we moved to our new location and, as you probably know, business has been booming!  The staff has been stretched pretty thin trying to keep up, so the time was ripe to call this trio of seasoned front-desk volunteers and see if they wanted to dust off their customer service skills. Lucky for us, they said yes, and now if you shop at Experienced Goods on a Tuesday, you will be ably and efficiently checked out by Veronica, Jackie or Mary. In addition, we have added a few new faces to our volunteer family: Karen, who you can find working behind the jewelry counter on Friday afternoons; Roberta, who is a whiz at organizing the clothing racks on Thursdays; Bob, who works on the sales floor on Wednesday afternoons; and Abby, Ingrid and Sasha, high-school students doing their required community service hours and bringing their youthful, enthusiastic energy to the store.  All these folks are generously donating their time and skills, and to say we are grateful doesn’t even scratch the surface. 

My friend Rebecca and I are planning to talk once a month by phone, and are already sending each other photos and recipes and music. When a relationship is renewed after many years of absence, I think less is taken for granted, and what is shared is sweeter.  To our volunteers both returning and new, welcome back, you are amazing, and thank you!