The Cookie Cure

by Susan Stachler

  I turned my face forward and whispered, “Not yet.”

  The church was enormous, a large, ceremonial sanctuary. My eyes locked onto the gold crucifix up by the altar. I’d walked up and down this aisle on countless Sundays throughout my life. But it had never been just Dad and me, arms linked together. I thought again, We are here. I am here. Dad is here. Dad was filled with joy and life that day. I wanted to take it all in. I chanted in my head, This is a good day.

  Dad said, “Susan, I’ve got you.” To me, it felt like this pause lasted minutes, but it was all of five seconds. Five seconds I will always remember.

  Finally, I nodded my head and off we went. Dad and I glided down the aisle. Randy and I had the most wonderful day. This was a blissful moment. This was a celebration.

  Dear Sue,

  I was thrilled to be a bridesmaid at your wedding. You had such a great time planning every detail. I loved wearing the pale-blue dress you chose with delicate embossed white butterflies scattered across the fabric. And, Sue, you looked so pretty. Your face was radiant. I had never seen you happier than you were that day. Susan’s wedding day was equally wonderful.

  It wasn’t long after Ken was diagnosed that Mother and Dad came for a visit. Dad said he wanted to ride with me to pick up Robert from high school. He did, but he also wanted to talk with me alone about Ken’s cancer. He worried for me in not knowing what the future would bring, saying, “You must feel like there is a sword over your head and you don’t know when it will fall.”

  Through the years I’ve thought countless times of that heartfelt talk with Dad and realized he was perhaps describing how he and Mother felt worrying about you. Not only worried about when you’d be sick again but living with knowing you would die young. It must have been more difficult than I can imagine for them to hear you say to Hoxsie during your vows, “Unto death do us part,” wondering when that would be.

  There was a time when I was terrified. Will Ken live to see our kids grow up, graduate from high school and college? Will he live to walk his daughters down the aisle? I didn’t know I’d end up having to worrying about Susan living to see that day too.

  Seeing Ken and Susan emerge from the back of the church was glorious. Leaning into the aisle to get a better look, they about took my breathe away. It was a sight I will never forget.

  Following Susan’s wishes, I shed no tears that day. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t shed a few leading up to the wedding. I would only let myself cry when I was alone in the car. And, it wasn’t about seeing her in a wedding dress or her fluffy veil. What if, after Susan moved out, something happened to her and I wasn’t there? I had been looking out for her every single day since she started her treatments. What would it be like not being fully responsible for her? Sue, I didn’t like the cliché, “Now she can be somebody else’s worry. Aren’t you glad to get rid of her?” I wasn’t. It was difficult to think of her driving down the street to another house. Although she used to joke about having to still live at home with her parents, Ken and I were happy to have her there with us. I had a watchful eye on everything. If she looked pale or tired, I was there. Checkups and scans, I was there. And, even though the treatments were over now and things were good, I still had my fears. I knew the cancer could come back.

  If I could have chosen to spare Randy the sadness I know he felt in seeing Susan suffer and his worries of what could happen to her and what their future might be, I would have. But I could see for myself what Susan meant to Randy, and that brought me great comfort. I reached over to hold Ken’s hand in the church pew as we witnessed Randy and Susan exchange vows. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I couldn’t help but think of Mother and Dad.

  16

  No Guts, No Glory

  It was a good thing Mom and I had cable in the shop so we could watch our lineup of shows. Spring was a slower time for us, and that year the economy was going into the gutter. Each day it seemed like the news about the bad economy got worse and worse, until one day the news anchors announced, “The United States is in the worst recession since the Great Depression.” It was distressing for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that a recession was definitely not good for our budding cookie business. It felt like the anchors were speaking directly to us: It’s not an ideal time to have a home-based business. No one is going to buy from you. No one in America should be buying anything.

  The situation became depressing and terribly worrisome. We wouldn’t say anything to each other while the news was on. Some days we even pretended not to hear the news at all. But there were times that our lunch conversation would end with, “What are we going to do? Is it over?” We decided that just because it was becoming harder didn’t mean we were going to quit. If anything, the challenges just fueled us to be more creative and to come up with new ideas for drumming up business. The bottom line was that we needed to sell cookies. We needed orders. Simple. But how could we reach new people and convince them to buy?

  Mom and I would stand in the shop and strategize. “If we sold at least a few boxes a day right now, we’d make it to the holidays… If our website attracted more shoppers… If some of our gift stores placed really large wholesale orders…” Those were a lot of ifs, and we knew it. We couldn’t keep sitting there hoping business would come to us. Looking back, I can’t believe all the things we pulled off, tried, and did. Our challenging times didn’t last long, but they had a lasting effect. They made us tough. I became daring in a way. Not that I’ll swim with sharks or jump out of an airplane, but I’m willing to try and push myself in a new way. Where I might have seen obstacles before, now I saw opportunities. Mom and I decided to say yes to different kinds of opportunities, yes to any and every idea we could dream up, and yes to recommendations and suggestions from our customers, other business owners, and even our friends. Sometimes they worked, other times they didn’t, but we were in it together, and that made it easier.

  One big change we made was introducing new flavors of Susansnaps. Up until that point, we’d sold only one cookie, our traditional gingersnap, but we did some experimenting and came up with two additional flavors: chocolate and lemon gingersnaps. We had never seen anyone else do flavored gingersnaps, and the recipes we devised were delicious. So we thought, Why not give it a try?

  We also decided to take Susansnaps on the road for years, attending as many shows as we could. Sometimes we had great success and other times we bombed; with each show, we never knew exactly what to expect. We went to a very popular Christmas gift show in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by thousands of shoppers. It took us two years of applying to get accepted, but once we were finally there, we couldn’t get one single, solitary person to stop at our booth. We had no idea why, and it wasn’t for lack of trying, but we only made a few sales. Do you know how depressing it is to drive home from a long show with a van full of product? I was tempted to tell Mom that we should just dump it on the side of the freeway. Every box that rattled on the way home was a reminder that we had failed.

  When Nordstrom asked us to set up a booth in our local mall, we did, basically putting up a card table and trying to sell to weekend shoppers. We went to farmers’ markets on Saturday mornings, trying several neighborhoods around Atlanta. At one, we only sold three bags of cookies, making twenty-seven dollars in sales against our forty-dollar entrance fee. I could go on and on about our various show experiences, like the time we sold in a horse stall inside a barn, and yes, there was old horse poop in the corner. Or the time we went to a show that was actually a carnival, complete with cotton candy, funnel cakes, and Ferris wheels. At least our local fire department was happy when we didn’t sell product—they got a lot of free cookies. It was either them, the cancer center, or the food bank. We couldn’t let our unsold cookies go to waste.

  Other times, we had more sales than we could handle. We went to the holiday sale at Bizarre Bazaar, a popular gift show in Richmond, Virginia, and were given a prime boot
h. Right from the opening of the first day, people kept stopping by, telling us they loved our story. It took us a while to figure out they already knew about us because we’d been featured in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that morning.

  By the last day of the show, we had completely sold out. We’d never sold out on the road before. If we ran out of cookies at a show near our shop, we’d just get up early in the morning or have someone fill in at the booth while we baked more. Here, there was nothing we could do but offer to take orders and ship them for free, in hopes of capturing some of the lost opportunity. Some shoppers were not so pleased, complaining, “I heard about you and wanted to buy these. You don’t have any more? Are you kidding?” At one point, Mom said to me, “Go to the van and see if you can find any! Maybe some slipped under the seats?”

  One woman even leaned over our display table to see if we were hiding any cookies. On our way home, Mom said, “If we could have sold the polka dots off our tablecloths, people would have bought them from us.” We were thrilled that Susansnaps had been such a success.

  When we were out on the road, my main job as the navigator was to find the closest Cracker Barrel to wherever we were heading. A trip wouldn’t have been complete without a dinner or two at Cracker Barrel. One time, we were driving home late at night and stopped at a Waffle House on the side of the freeway in a not-so-pleasant neighborhood. We had $6,000 in cash on us. Mom didn’t think it would be smart to leave it in the van and said, “Suz, grab the cash.”

  “How much? Just for dinner?”

  “No. All of it. Stuff it in my purse. We’re taking it with us.”

  I wadded up the $6,000. And with that, we went in for our $2.99 waffles and scrambled eggs!

  If Dad or Randy knew some of the things we did, they’d be so mad at us! So we didn’t tell them. This wasn’t to deceive—it was our optimism. Mom and I had a pact between us since the get-go: “No matter what happens, we say it went well.” Every event we went to or sale we attempted, that had been our deal.

  • • •

  One of our infamous trips was to Palm Beach, Florida. After twelve hours of driving, we were pulling off the freeway when Mom said, “Susan, grab the directions. Which way do I go?”

  “This says turn right.”

  “Okay, but I’m pretty sure West Palm Beach is to the left.”

  We turned right, and I wondered, Is Mom seeing what I’m seeing? as we drove past barbed wire and armed guards.

  Hesitantly, Mom said, “Is that a prison?”

  “Um. Yeah, I think so.” As we pulled into the parking lot for our venue across the street, I couldn’t help but add, “Is anyone going to come to this event?”

  The show started off very slow. The air-conditioning had broken, so it was extremely hot. And no one was shopping. The aisles were quiet. Other vendors began complaining among themselves, but Mom and I would have nothing to do with that.

  The ticket price for this event included admission to see some famous chefs from the Food Network do cooking demonstrations, which seemed to be the main attraction for the show—the crowds for those events were enormous.

  As Mom chatted with some shoppers, Ashley, the coordinator of the show, ran up to our booth with a giant grin on her face. She blurted out, “Bobby Flay likes Susansnaps! Out of all the food here, he likes your cookies best. He wants to know if he can use them in his cooking demonstration.”

  We had offered bakery bags for the backstage celebrity lounge but didn’t think much about it.

  “Is that okay?” Ashley prompted.

  “Yes! Of course,” Mom responded quickly. “He didn’t have to ask, but thank you for letting us know.”

  Ashley started to walk away, waving frantically for me to follow her, so I did.

  Before I could ask where we were headed, Ashley pulled back a long black curtain. There was Bobby Flay, sitting in an armchair in the middle of a makeshift greenroom, holding a white bakery bag with a familiar black-and-white polka-dot ribbon. Bobby Flay was eating our snaps. Wow. A famous chef is eating something Mom and I baked, I thought.

  Ashley introduced us. “Bobby, this is Susan. She’s the one who makes the gingersnaps.” Bobby got out of his chair and stuck out his hand to greet me.

  After I eeked out a profound, “Hi! I’m Susan,” I saw a woman wearing a headset peek between the curtains.

  “We’re ready,” she called.

  Bobby Flay glanced at the bag in his hands. “These are delicious. Nice work.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “My mom and I bake them. We turned our garage into a commercial kitchen, and we can bake up to five thousand in a day.”

  He smiled. “You and your mom? You bake these cookies?”

  As he began moving toward the exit, I heard Mom’s voice in my head: Say something. I was still surprised, but I took a breath and said in a rush, “Yes, we do. We only bake gingersnaps. My dad and I both went through chemo. My mom had started a dessert company, and she heard that ginger was a stomach soother, so she created this recipe, and now we work together.”

  He stopped walking and looked right at me. “That’s fantastic,” he said. “You’ve got a good thing going. You two keep baking.” And that was it.

  I was bursting with excitement when I got back to the booth, but there was no time to tell Mom the details, because word had gotten out that we had “the Bobby Flay cookies,” and customers were swarming our booth. We were told that during his dessert demo, Bobby said, “Why bake when you can buy Susansnaps?” and he shared a snippet about us.

  It was fantastic that a famous chef had given our product the thumbs-up. But the thing we took away from this? You never really know what’s going to happen until you show up.

  • • •

  After a failed show or multiple days without orders, it was the messages we received that encouraged us to keep going.

  “Hi, Mary! Sending love, hugs, prayers, and good karma! Along with some yummy cookies. Much love.”

  “Grandma, happy birthday! I’m thinking of you, and I wish I could sit down with you and eat these cookies!”

  “Dave, never give in! Never give up! I hope these cookies give you strength to fight. You’ve got this, and we love you.”

  I’d think, Who else can we reach? It can’t be over until we’ve exhausted all possibilities. We can do this. And we did. There would be one person in Wyoming sending a cookie gift to their friend in Nebraska. Somebody in North Carolina shipping to Arizona, and in the meantime, thanking us for having this cookie company.

  In the midst of all the things we were trying, I also realized I had one life, and I needed to make the most of it. That’s what we were doing with Susansnaps, and I felt like I was bringing Aunt Sue along too. Mom, Aunt Sue, and I were in this together. Whenever we tried something new, Mom and I would figure, What’s the worst that can happen? If we got turned down, something didn’t work, or we got no response, I could live with that. We wouldn’t know unless we tried.

  We started doing speaking gigs as well. We’d speak to groups of twenty and groups of two hundred: church, high school, ladies clubs, bereavement groups, rotary clubs. We weren’t beyond cold calling either. We never had appointments, but we’d deliver cookies to radio shows in the wee hours of the morning, companies around town, car dealerships, doctor and dentist offices, yoga studios, veterinarian offices, CPAs, and lawyers. Is it possible to feel totally confident and insecure all at the same time? I did. But my inner drive pushed past that. It had to in order to keep up with Mom. She takes things on with gusto. I would walk into a front office and say, “Hello, I have a delivery,” all the while thinking, What am I doing? And Mom would give her best, “Are you familiar with Susansnaps? We thought you’d like to know…” Even if someone wasn’t too sure about us, the offer of free cookies got us in the door.

  The worst, but also the best, was when we’d get to an office comp
lex and we’d get out of our car and go separate ways. “Suz, I’ll go to the building on the right,” Mom would say. “You go that way.” Oh, I loved and hated this. Mom and I would meet back at the car with all kinds of stories.

  I continued writing to newspapers, radio, TV shows, and magazines. Big news, little news, and everything in between was important to us. Mom and I found ourselves plopping on headsets for an interview with Atlanta Business Radio. I was grateful to have gotten a call to be on, but once we sat down with a gigantic microphone two inches from our faces, I sort of wanted to escape. This was going to be live, and any bloopers would be recorded.

  Then we came up with the craziest idea we’d had yet. We decided to fly to New York to hand deliver letters and cookie samples, in hopes of getting in a major magazine.

  As Mom and I stood on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan, I began to question why we had thought this was a good idea. Standing among street vendors selling hot dogs and jumbo pretzels, taxis buzzing up and down Eighth Avenue, and businesspeople coming and going, the two of us with our boxes of Susansnaps suddenly seemed trivial. Once again, I found my heart pounding, my palms sweating. What will we say? What’s going to happen?

  Staring into the large, pristine lobby of the Hearst Corporation’s headquarters, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was apprehensive. But I believed we had a product, a company, and a story this media empire should know about, so I reminded myself, It’s just a glass door to a building in a city. You know you’ve got this.

  I had this thing I learned to do when I thought something was too much for me or when I was nervous and unsure: inner pep talks. My chemo had an accumulative effect, where each round was more difficult. It became harder knowing what was coming. When I rode the elevator to treatment, my heart would start pounding, my palms would sweat, and I’d begin to panic. I dreaded knowing that in a few minutes I would have to step off the elevator and surrender myself to more chemicals, more sickness, and more pain. But I would build myself up: “You can do this. You can step off this elevator. And, look, Mom’s right there next to you.” With a deep breath and a smile, I’d step off the elevator. If Mom and I could do that, we could certainly do this.