Industrial arts

Eva Murray: The little kids are my best customers

Eva Murray

Sat, 09/01/2018 - 7:45pm

Kenzie

I have a tiny summer business, a bakery, where for a couple of months each year I put in long workdays producing sugar-based indulgences, fragrant homemade bread, nostalgia, cholesterol, and defiance of all scientific dietary advice. People walk in and often begin with, “It smells good in here!” which makes me very happy. What they say next depends largely upon their demographic.

Matinicus Island doesn’t get that much true tourism, since we do not have guaranteed daily transportation and there are few places to stay and no restaurants. We do have a gang of summer visitors. Many of them would be annoyed should anyone call them a tourist. Instead, they are the grandchildren of islanders, or the buddies of lobstermen, or the in-laws, or the sternman’s girlfriend’s friends from work, or somebody’s crew of carpenters, or the direct descendants of Ebenezer Hall. He had more descendants than Genghis Khan.

Sternmen and teenagers show up at the bakery genuinely hungry. Middle-aged vacationers who do not normally eat this stuff briefly consider sharing a pastry, but somebody eventually admits, “I want my own.”

Stoned people spend a lot of money but completely forget that they have ordered a blueberry pie for tomorrow.

Pretentious snobs — thankfully rare on Matinicus — ask a great many questions, which they answer themselves, and then buy a bottle of water. (Their wagons I can often fix with my daughter’s Phillips Exeter Academy sweatshirt, hanging inconspicuously on a hook with the oilskins and the Hamilton Marine hat. Noses held high, they presume themselves slumming along the savages on this most remote of outports until they spot the Exeter lion and do a noticeably awkward double-take. Afterwards, I get to write about their bit of cognitive dissonance here. Hey, we need to laugh when we can.)

Sailboat people troop in by the half-dozen, dressed for the Yukon from the waist up and for the Bahamas from belt-loops to bare toes, and proceed to take inventory out loud.

One of them will announce that they don’t need bread because there are still three slices left in the galley. Aboard their noble craft all provisions are measured and accounted for with excruciating accuracy. These folks are often the ones who want to control the air time for the next half hour but, as a rule, if they are smiling when they come through the door, all shall be well. This year, we’ve had a pretty easy-going group of sailboat tourists. That’s been a relief.

Unaccompanied children, however, are a delight. They may count the chocolate chips in each cookies, or eyeball the quantity of icing on any given cinnamon roll, and they scrutinize their options in mind to find the biggest piece, but they do not ask me to make something I don’t offer (no, I cannot make pineapple-upside-down cake just like your grandmother used to make). They do not bait me into a discussion of some intractable island problem in order to make themselves sound like an “insider.”

The children do not ask why we don’t have wind turbines like they do on Vinalhaven, and they do not ask why the ferry doesn’t come here every day, or why nobody has ever thought to pave the airstrip or run a tidal power plant in the harbor or buy a helicopter.

Even mud-covered brats with the manners of a bear cub are easier to deal with than a similarly difficult adult or—even worse—a bratty kid in the company of a clueless parent. When kids arrive attached to adults they may tease or argue. Not so when they are without parents; a roving pack of short, sawed-off bicycle hooligans with fistfuls of dollars and nobody minding their diet is my idea of a customer base.

With little kids shopping solo, you don’t have to pretend you didn’t notice when they move to touch all the cookies. You can, in good conscience, set them straight about how things are going to work. They do not take offense. They are also sometimes loaded and wish to spend all they can. Children might carelessly lose their whoopie pie wrapper on the lawn, but at least they aren’t tossing cigarette butts in my driveway, or reeking of aftershave, or trying to bring Mister Muffins the Man-eating Mutt who seems to be half Chihuahua and half thresher shark into the bakery against regulation.

This little shop, which is barely even that and has no name (only a license, a water test certificate, and a sales tax number) makes children visibly happy, and that is definitely some of the payment for my labor. Little kids are hands down my favorite customers. Children do not ask a lot of irrelevant questions. They just blurt out, “Do you have any whoopie pies?” I love it; no obligatory chatter, no interrogation about my background, no introductions one-by-one with a slow handshake from each in the group as though I will ever see them again.

Adult tourists—I mean true tourists, of the strangers-passing-through variety, usually moored awkwardly in our notably underserviced working harbor — are nothing if not polite (except in those rare but memorable occasions when they are entirely boorish and awful,) but polite takes time. Children, however, know what they are about. That would be a cinnamon roll and an orange soda. No funny business.

They do not care that the reason I am out of the Matinicus-shaped butter cookies Leah calls “sprinkle cookies” is that the omnipresent fog messed with air service deliveries and thus with everybody’s grocery orders and thus I am out of sprinkles. Are there cookies? Yes or no will do. They do not need to hear the excuse. If I have run out of something, children do not go all “Hamlet” on me. There is no dinner theater, with wailing and gnashing of teeth, because I’ve sold out of the thing they were “counting on.” Children just pick something else.

Aside from direct, cookie-related inquiries, the only other topic of interest to the little kids is where Riley the cat might be found. Fair enough; the cat is friendly and soft and can jolly well earn her keep by entertaining a few toddlers; she does little else around here.

The children who come to my bakery do not ask what I do all winter, and they do not ask how long I’ve had the bakery (random tourists who don’t know me at all and have no reason to care in the slightest press that inexplicable question all the time. I guess they think they have to make conversation.)

They ask, “Where’s the cat?” and sometimes, “Is there any more root beer?” I try to make sure there is root beer. The cat is a free agent and outside of my command.

Anyway, as my baking season winds up, here’s a deeply-felt and sincere thank-you to all my customers who can still count their years on their fingers. They are without pretense, happy with the offerings, and reliably sober. That is all any storekeeper can wish from a customer.

So here’s my word of thanks to Hayden, Dale, and DJ with their bagful of coins possibly salvaged from the floor of Danny’s truck; and to James who rides the roads, and to Travis who announces very clearly that he “will have a ginger cookie.”

Thanks to William and Kayden and the gaggle of kids expertly wrangled by the slightly older and very wise Skylar; to Grace, who asks for “a delicious red strawberry popsicle, please,” in a distinct British accent, because why not, and to Reverdy sneaking over with her dad for a surreptitious doughnut.

Here’s to Trey on whatever contraption he’s riding this year, and Frankie who’s quiet but keeps an eye out, and Sammy who shows up with a pocketful of wet money because it’s been in swimming.

My thanks to Miles and Lydia and their gang shouting over each other, and Harper and Taft just barely old enough to hike up the path from their grandparents’ cottage to purchase their cookies all by themselves, which is a big adventure; to cousins Kiki and Jae and Leah under the careful attention of Trishelle, and Payson and Asher still on their parents’ backs, and Rose and Lydia and Will, and Abbie and Benjamin, and Gavin and Simon—children whose parents used to be the kids who came for cookies and doughnuts, and who thankfully haven’t outgrown their sweet tooth entirely--and Kenzie and her “partner in crime” the stern and serious Eli, who gets annoyed when we don’t remember that he wants the same thing as he got last time.

Eli is chicken farmer and a major egg entrepreneur around here, so has his own money. He will start kindergarten this year.

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