Years ago I helped a newage type store with some web work. My wife could always tell I'd been there because within seconds of stepping in the door the cotton fibers of my tee shirt and jeans would be infused with a blend of hundreds of incense fragrances that permeated the air in the store. I smelled great, and very mooney, the rest of the day as I billowed some nag champa-moon flower-"Night Essence" cloud behind me.
You know the type of store. It sold crystals and candles and scented oils. Henna tattoo kits. Pewter dragons and CDs of rain forest sounds and books on meditation and yoga and so on.
You get the idea.
Their biggest money maker, though, was the gift and fruit baskets.
A motherly and disarming woman owned the store with the help of her daughter. A typical Muskegon story...they had both lost their jobs and started this store. They were both living out a dream.
Their own American dream.
It was a neat store. The sort of place where the owners tried to know the names of everybody who walked in the door.
The daughter made the gift baskets and created her own incense and scented oils. Bring your favorite scent to her and she'd work in her "lab" in the back until she matched it for a fraction of the price of the original sample.
The mother was the master of her own fate, managing the business of the store, spending time with her daughter, and letting her friends teach yoga courses, or meditation, or massage classes in the back room.
They loved it.
And for four years the two worked together, seeing high tides and low tides, the stuff of business.
If their biz was a sit-com, I would have been a regular character, popping in to chat and answer their technology questions. I knew about their families and hobbies. For a couple years, visiting the store before picking up my wife from work became a regular part of my week. We chatted while my son played with the crystals and stones.
Then....one day I went in and the daughter was conspicuously absent. Unfinished gift baskets stood in a row in the back. The mother, despondent.
"I had to let her go."
She nodded solemnly as I sniffed at one of the incense sticks of the scent called "Gollum." Custom made by the daughter. A nice, woody scent.
"I couldn't afford the insurance anymore...and she has a condition, so...she needed something. Right? And she needed someplace that could offer her group insurance. Right? What else could we do?"
She tried to say these words as matter of factly as she could.
"I told her to start looking a while back, and she finally found something...and now I guess it's just me for now..."
Several weeks later the mother had a heart attack. Without the daughter to mind the store and create the gift baskets, it went un-tended and shuttered for two months during the mother's recovery. All the classes, cancelled. Her sister and a hodge podge of friends in a valient show of friendship tried to keep it going but at irregular hours and they didn't know how to manage the gift baskets.
The store closed for good shortly thereafter.