Sometimes you don’t know who is missing in your life until you meet her. Once I had moved into the city apartment with my daughter, I lost my young mother friends from the country. But shortly after moving in, I met my  neighbor, Kathy, who lived in a house next to our apartment building. She was my age, a single parent, and she had a biracial little boy almost exactly the same age as my daughter. Our children hit it off immediately, both mischievous and creative, content to play a long time in the courtyard.

Kathy and I swapped stories about life, love, work and parenting. Our special late afternoon treat was a can of Olympia Light beer. I’m not sure how we settled on it, but it was cheap, low calorie and tasty enough. We would drink a can, sitting on the porch step and watch the kids play. Occasionally, we would go wild and have TWO Olympia Light beers. Neither of us had two nickels to rub together, so that was a big splurge.

Kathy watched my daughter when she had to miss school for an illness. I watched her son in turn. She shared the house next door with a lovely man, but they were truly just friends, she being as reluctant to jump into another relationship as I was. Eventually though, proximity won out, friendship turned to love and they married. They remained together until her recent death from cancer, a disease she had struggled with for at least 20 years.

She came into my life at the perfect time, and I like to think I did the same for her. “I know I’ll often stop and think about her.”

When my daughter and I moved into the city apartment, I was very nervous because I had a family member who was quite unstable. I was concerned about being bothered and unprotected since I now lived alone. Fortunately, the manager of this complex was excellent, much more suited to the task than I had been in my manager days.

“Bob the manager” as my daughter called him was my age and immediately reassured me about my safety. He had a mentally ill sister, so he was familiar with dealing with the cycles of stability and instability that often come with the territory. He assured me that at any time I could go out the back door, come over to his apartment and get his help. I never needed to do that, but it was terribly comforting.

“Bob the manager’s” other great quality was a calm spirit around my 2 year old daughter. He was the one person I could rely on to go out to dinner with the two of us and not be bothered by her antics. Once we sat in a trolley car at a restaurant and noticed that she was dropping food on the table below our seats! We just broke out laughing.

“Bob the manager” introduced me to Bruce Springsteen, a debt I can never adequately repay. Most important of all, “Bob the manager” didn’t push me for a romantic relationship. I was newly separated and the last thing I needed was a romance. Instead he provided steady male assurance, company at restaurants and help with minor repairs.  From time to time, I ran into him after we moved. He would always ask after the little girl who had called him “Bob the manager.”

Once we moved onto our five acres, I became friends with the woman next door, Mary Ann Mock. She had a baby Ricky the same age as my daughter and a son, Scott, two years older. The Mocks had sold us our home, formerly owned by his grandfather, and built a new one on the adjacent land.

The highlight of our weekdays was the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” It aired at lunch time, for just half an hour, so it was conveniently on while the kids were awake and just before we would put them down for their naps. After a morning of infants and toddlers, we were both ready to lose ourselves in the drama of Mary and Jack. We both were well past the honeymoon stage(as are most women with infants!) and their romance was a great distraction.

My daughter received her first injury while we were visiting. Once she had fit under the dining room table, but she had grown a few inches. She ran headlong into the edge of table and bumped her head. I think she was as angry as she was hurt, but I was in a panic. Mary Ann calmly got a wet washcloth and some ice and showed me how to hold it against my daughter’s forehead to reduce the swelling. I learned from Mary Ann that my calm would calm my daughter, something I would use for all the subsequent bumps, bruises and fractures to come.

Here’s to friends and soap operas. They both eased the stress of those early years of parenting.

When my daughter was three months old, I had a chance to take a course towards my master’s degree. My husband was in school himself, so he wasn’t available to watch her. Fortunately, from my work in Head Start, I had made friends with a county worker, Donna, whose little baby was almost exactly the same age. So we made a trade to swap mornings watching each other’s babies.

I had the easier time of it, since I could drive up to Donna’s house with all the paraphernalia that infants require. She had to haul the play pen, bottles, diapers, toys and baby down the walkway to our houseboat. Amusingly, after the four hours that each of us was away, we were bursting with the milk that our hungry babies had been denied for that time. When I got back to her house. I would just plop down with my baby and a cup of coffee and catch up with Donna. When she returned to my house, she did the same.

One of the things that writing this series of posts about “cookie people” has done for me has been to remember the kind and helpful neighbors and friends that were in my life, often for just a short time. Each of them made a significant difference for me. Donna allowed me to take a class knowing my daughter was being well cared for. Watching her son allowed her to work very part-time as a social worker. I lost touch with her after I moved into the city. She was very important for a very specific time in my life, as are many of the people who help us carry on. I wonder if I have ever been a “cookie person” for someone. Have you?

When I lived on the houseboat, and later when we moved into our own home on our five acres, we were surrounded by farms. I had taught myself to can and to make jam and jelly and with produce so readily available, the summer was full of jars.

Canning food is only economical if the supply of produce is abundant and affordable. Fortunately, in Scappoose, it was both. The first farm I visited to buy cherries was owned by a childless couple Walt and Hazel Gilbert. Hazel took to me and my daughter, just an infant, right away. After that first visit, I never paid for any produce.

The Gilberts supplied me with cherries, apples, raspberries, blackberries, pears, corn, tomatoes, green beans, squash and asparagus. I made jam and jelly from all the fruit and canned the pears and all the  vegetables except the summer squash. I had been raised with holy dread of botulism, and I took no chances in my canning techniques, carefully following the USDA approved methods. Only the asparagus failed to can properly, and it was the only batch I had to discard.

Walt was a silent type, but he willingly went up in the trees for the fruit. Hazel was very warm and social and delighted in our regular visits. Their gift of food was a real blessing at a time when we were short of money and long on time. I will always remember their bountiful generosity.

When I was expecting my daughter, the woman who lived on the houseboat next to us asked me about my baby shower. I told her that I wasn’t having one. This was unacceptable to my kind neighbor, so she threw me a shower herself. Helen Miller was that kind of person. Married to a fireman, mother of two grown daughters and two grandchildren, she was a friendly but fairly private person. That she went out of her way to throw me a real baby shower touched me deeply.

She pulled out all the stops. There was a cake shaped like a baby sweater, matching cups and plates, and fruit punch. We played silly baby shower games. The only one I remember involved guessing how many sheets of toilet paper it would take to wrap around my late pregnancy self.

She invited a few neighbors, her daughters and my mother. My mother came for the shower, the only time she visited the houseboat moorage. Still, Helen supplied plenty of maternal care and attention. We only knew each other as neighbors, and I never saw her after we moved on land. But she stepped in to supply a need I didn’t even know I had. A party to celebrate my coming baby!

She always called me “Bang Goes Old Betsy” after Davy Crocket’s rifle. It was a term of endearment, nothing more, and I can hear her even now chuckling as she said hello. Melody Ann Blake eventually Ollison became my friend right after college when I was seeing a brother of the father of her little boy. My dating ended quickly, but in Melody I found someone who easily traversed the white/black divide that was Portland, Oregon in the late 1960’s.

Melody’s son was biracial, white from Melody and black from his dad. His dad was from a large warm extended family, and Melody had stayed close to them even though she had never married their son. She had a terrific sense of humor and we enjoyed each other’s company immensely. After I left the little apartment house for the houseboat, Melody took over managing the eight units, since she had moved in after I had become the manager. I remember her most for her ability to make molehills out of mountains. I was fairly overdramatic in those days, especially about romance, and she was always ready to ground me.

We lost touch after I moved to the country, though she let me know that she had married a kind and hardworking man and felt settled in her life. I didn’t hear of her again until I read in the newspaper that she had been murdered by an adult stepson. I never learned the details, but I attended her funeral. I said goodbye to a decent woman with a wicked sense of humor and without a mean bone in her body. A real friend.

The other great listener my freshman year in college was Dr. James, not to be confused with the famous William James from an earlier time at Harvard. My Dr. James was the professor of a freshman seminar I was fortunate to enroll in. These seminars had just 12 students and were a saving contrast to the huge lecture courses that filled the rest of my first year in college.

Dr. James had selected the students for his seminar on “Freud.” I knew nothing about Freud except for the phrase “Freudian slip” and the quote that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” My classmates were, to my mind, all terribly sophisticated and knowledgeable about psychoanalytic theory. I was silent during most of the discussions, terrified to reveal my ignorance.

Each week we had assigned readings, but we also were to hand in a two page paper about any topic we felt like exploring. These papers were read only by Dr. James, so my fear of being exposed was eliminated. I frequently wrote about feeling lost and out of place at Harvard. Suddenly surrounded by a majority of private school educated classmates, my West Coast public high school education left me behind many of my peers.

Fortunately, Dr. James took a personal and caring interest in me. He made his office available to me to come and talk about anything. He shared with me that he had started out in Utah and knew how hard the adjustment was for me. I visited him for the next three years of college, always knowing his door was open to me. He made my entrance into and survival through college possible. I am eternally grateful.

Well, unless you were a kid in the 1950’s in the United States, you probably don’t recognize either the frog or the quote. In a very popular(since there were very few) children’s television show called “Andy’s Gang” the frog appeared after Andy said, “plunk your magic twanger froggy.” Then this frog popped up from a wooden stand and said, “hiya kids, hiya, hiya.” The frog was a complete mischief maker, always interfering with the talks other guests were trying to deliver to the kids.

What on earth does that have to do with “cookie people,” those who sustained, comforted and encouraged me in my life? It connects through Ellen Schwartz, a sophomore when I was a very lonely freshman in college. She kept a plush stuffed frog on her bed, and when I first saw it I said,”plunk your magic twanger, froggy” and she said, “hiya kids,hiya, hiya.” It turns out they watched the same kids show in Cleveland, Ohio that I saw in Portland, Oregon.

She listened to me a great deal that first year, about my roommate, about the challenge of my classes, about boys, and about homesickness. At the end of that year, she invited me to join with three other sophomores in moving “off campus,” to the house I described a few weeks ago. She remained a good friend throughout my college years. After graduation she married a wonderful man and moved to Washington Heights in New York City where I was able to visit a number of times.

I lost touch with her after I moved back to Oregon and only learned of her death, in a tragic fall, when I read it in our alumnae bulletin. I grieved then for her life cut short. She provided a lifeline to me when I needed it most. And she did it simply by listening.

As a junior in high school, I needed recommendations for college. I had a very incompetent counselor assigned to me whose job it was to write these recommendations. She had been my Latin teacher, and I had once observed her getting up on the desk and doing a mock can-can to a declension of Latin adjectives. Such was our awe of authority, that it occurred to no one to do anything but gawk.

Anyway, she was the one to ask for reference letters. She told me that she would only write one letter and I could choose between Oregon State University and the University of Oregon. I didn’t want to go to either college, so she told me she wouldn’t help me. (Maybe I had done a major eye roll at her grammar demonstration. Maybe she was an alcoholic and didn’t like to work.)

To my great relief, Mrs. Bassett, the vice principal, asked me how my applications were going. When I told her my predicament, she promised she would personally write whatever recommendations I needed. In a time when each letter or form had to be individually filled out, this was a gift of her time. Fortunately, in those days, we only applied to three colleges: a safety, a reach and a real reach. Her letter helped get me admitted to my real reach.

Later, she overstepped her helpfulness by asking a senior to invite me to the junior-senior prom since she knew I wasn’t going. When he did, I politely declined, to his great relief I imagine. But I am grateful that she reached out to me both with helpful aid and with unwanted help. I don’t know what she did about that counselor!