Mount Rushmore

Yesterday, at my farmers market, I was relieved to see my customer Richard after my three-month hiatus. He was doing so much better than the last time I saw him when I worried I would never see him again. I met Richard two summers ago. He suffered a stroke that disrupted his digestive tract, and his wife Kathy was having trouble finding things he could eat.

I was still able to cook up samples of our spätzle sautéed in butter at the market and gave one to Richard. While he was tasting his sample, I gave him and his wife our “spätzle spiel” and told them all about it.

He liked our spätzle, so his wife bought him a package to try at home. Richard became a regular customer since our spätzle was one of the only things his digestive system could tolerate. The first two ingredients in our spätzle are milk and eggs, which make up 50%, giving him some protein that filled him up, plus he loved it. This is the stuff that makes our business feel so worthwhile. 

I got to know Richard pretty well, but the funny thing was, I didn’t know his first name. There comes the point in a relationship with a customer when it’s too late to ask their name; this was one of those times. He shared with me new things he was able to do again while recovering from his stroke each week, and I didn’t know his name. Come on, Julz! Ugh.

Last summer, I finally got up the courage to ask him his name and admit I never asked before. He said, “a lot of people used to know my name.” Next, he told me that he wrote a book called Love letters from Mount Rushmore. He told me he was more proud of his book than his 50-year professional acting career.

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So there I was, sweating my ass off on this hot summer day, my sunglasses fogging up from my mask, amazed by what he just told me. His wife joined us; she told me he was in the middle of his second book when he had his stroke. You could tell right away that Richard was upset by this and said, “I’ll finish it when my brain heals.”

I went home and looked up his book; sure enough, there it was, right on Amazon. The book tells of his parent’s love story and the love letters he found in an old trunk in the attic. His father was one of the sculptors working on Mount Rushmore and missed his wife deeply, home in Rochester, NY.

Next, I looked up Richard’s biography and figured out what he meant when he said everyone used to know his name. He was a professional actor that appeared in hundreds of commercials and tv shows that I remembered as a kid. There was even a YouTube video with many clips of his work. He acted with all the big Hollywood stars, but his favorite role was playing a General Hospital villain. Guess what? I knew who his character was, Bill Watson, since I used to watch General Hospital. 

Whenever I visit my mother at the nursing home she lives at, I look at the other residents and wonder who they may have been when they were younger. Sadly, you can’t ever really find out since most have dementia. 

When you see Richard, he is a frail old gentleman struggling to recover from his stroke. Some people may only see him as just that, but behind that frail older man, he IS fascinating and talented, not was.

The next week when I saw him at the farmers market, I said to him, “ Ha, now I know who you are! You were Bill Watson, and I remember you! You are a Hollywood star!” Do you know what he said? “That’s nothing compared to you.” I didn’t know what he meant. “You are a superstar because you make the only thing I can eat .” Well shit…I started crying, and we hugged each other, even during a pandemic.