About 25 years ago, I decided to do a summer job that involved some very unusual things. First, a lot of us college students from California carpooled across the country to Nashville, Tennessee, to go to a sales school. That one-week “school” taught us how to sell books door-to-door on the East Coast. Specifically, we spent each day memorizing a 10-or-so-page script word for word and practicing using the different nuances of it with each other until we sounded conversational rather than robotic.
We were embarking on selling books in little towns all over the Eastern Seaboard, learning the kinds of routines that would get us through each day successfully. We would be peddling condensed encyclopedias on foot for 13½ hours a day, 6 days a week, with one peanut butter and jelly sandwich in our bag as fuel until we got home and crashed for the night.
“Home” – that’s where things get a lot more unusual. We drove away from Nashville headed toward New Jersey knowing that before ever speaking a word about books, we would start pounding the pavement in search of a place to lay our heads every night. It’s no joke – every car full of kids began the job with a specific memorized script for finding a home, and we split up and went door-to-door to ask people if we could live with them for the summer. The company sent all of us kids to the opposite side of the country so that when we encountered such obstacles, we couldn’t just quit and go home.
There were five of us girls, and after a few solid days of rejections, we finally found an 85-year-old woman – Henrietta – who had allowed kids from a previous year to stay in her attic. She was very hesitant to do it again, and only relented because we were so desperate. Her stipulations were that she would never have to see us, never have to hear us, and never be bothered by us being in her space. We wholeheartedly agreed to respect her peaceful life. We would quietly slip out in the early morning after one of us silently made our sandwiches, and quietly slip back in at night to tiptoe up the stairs and eat some dry ramen before conking out (two of us in beds, three in sleeping bags on the floor).
There’s so much more to the story, and I’ve written the whole thing here.
Throughout the summer – the hot, sweaty, rejection-filled, character-building summer – we knew that our last two weeks would change. We would have to accurately place all of the orders we had taken at each doorstep with the company, expect a huge truck to appear in the driveway on a certain day, and shift gears by personally delivering every one of those books to the people who had bought them. All of the hand-drawn maps we had made of every house and street we had visited over those months would become indispensable, as we would revisit the ones marked with a bright color that implied a sale was made there.
The unusual part? We would need to incorporate a new part of our script in those last weeks – asking people if we could borrow their car to deliver the books all day, every day. Can you imagine? It seemed like one of the most outlandish things you could ever ask someone. Somehow, it always worked out for all of the students in previous summers, so we knew that our crazy need would somehow be answered in some unpredictable way.
As those days came upon us, the other four girls that I shared the attic with (like temporary sisters in our shared experience) gradually found people who offered them various forms of transportation. I was not so fortunate. The days passed and I got no closer to a solution for delivering my orders. I had no idea what to do; I was beginning to feel completely helpless.
A few months beforehand, the company had told every group of kids that once they arrived in the area in which they would begin working, they would need to have a morning routine based around a local diner. After waking up, showering, getting dressed, and making sandwiches, we would go to that diner to start our day together. We would order the same inexpensive thing each morning, like a bagel and juice, and build each other up with positivity before going our separate ways in separate towns (the girl who owned the car we had driven across the country in dropped each of us off before walking her town).
We started out in a dull, lifeless diner and somehow came upon a great little place called The Haledon Grill a few weeks later, where the woman who waited on us each morning – Robin – was so kind, treating us like we were old friends. Being a cereal person, my taste buds were also elated by the change, as my daily bagel morphed to a daily overflowing bowl of Blueberry Morning.
As the weeks went on, Robin’s care for us began to feel family-like, which was such a welcome change from all of the rejections we got daily at every door. She even offered to take us all out one Saturday night. I’m not even sure how we had any cute clothes to wear aside from our boring daily “uniforms” of T-shirts and shorts. But I vaguely remember us looking nice, packing into her car, and going out for the night to have fun. I don’t remember how it worked, I only remember how I felt – what a happy, freeing, sweet departure it was from feeling like lonely automatons all day long, every day.
The five of us girls (three in the top middle and two bookending the bottom) with Robin (top left) and other members of her family outside of The Haledon Grill
Robin had a husband and two young daughters, so we knew she was going out of her way to go and have fun with us. Somewhere along the line, I also found out she was a Christian, but it wasn’t because of anything blatant she said; I’m not even sure how we knew. It wasn’t ever talked about, just something one of the girls mentioned in a fleeting moment, and that gave me comfort since I had grown up in a Catholic family and was quietly praying my way through the hardships of grueling days of rejection on the streets of New Jersey.
As the days came when the other girls acquired the cars that had been lent to them and drove off with the books they needed to deliver, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t have any glimmers of hope. No leads. Nothing.
I can’t remember how it all played out, but I must have mentioned it to Robin one morning as the girls left the restaurant and I didn’t know what to do. There was a large moving truck full of books parked in Henrietta’s driveway, and I needed every single moment of those last weeks to offload mine from the truck and get them where they needed to go. We were never supposed to waste even a minute, so while we were delivering books, we were also taught to continue selling more along the way. The company would mail out the remaining books we sold directly to the customers once we had to drive back to the West Coast and start school again. I continued on walking through neighborhoods and knocking on doors, but it felt futile to sell more books when what I really needed was an immediate way to begin delivering all of the ones sitting at the house.
A couple of long, unproductive days passed. Robin knew what we all had to do, and we all knew she couldn’t lend out her car. But I think I got so desperate that I asked Robin if she had any ideas. I can’t remember the details clearly anymore, but again, I remember how she made me feel. Robin, who worked full time and had a family to take care of every night when she went home, told me she would find a way to help. She would somehow squeeze in the time to drive me all around.
I knew it was a hard decision for her. I knew it was a sizeable weight on her. Or at least that’s how I felt for creating such a burden.
Robin decided that if business got slow each day at the Grill, she would try her best to leave early and take me to all of the different neighborhoods I had sold books in. Not knowing what time that could mean, and not wanting to lose a moment of her generous offer, I sat in The Haledon Grill for hours, eating Blueberry Morning by the box. It felt so odd after having to be on the move every minute of every previous day, but I felt so comforted that she was about to save me. The moment she got off, we hit the road and delivered as many books as we could in the few fleeting hours she could devote to helping me before getting home for a late dinner with her family.
Every morning for the next week or so, I’d sit in the grill and eat a breakfast and lunch of Blueberry Morning until the moment she could whisk me away. Amazingly, in just a few fast hours of zipping around each afternoon or evening, we were able to offload a summer’s load of selling.
Before I knew it, it was done. The truck was emptied of its books, the five of us girls packed up our few belongings, and said goodbye to Henrietta – whom we had never disturbed or even really seen in those months.
Me and kind Henrietta, saying goodbye 
Me and Kristin – our last day on Henrietta’s front porch 
Ellen, me, and Kristin in front of the pond down the street from Henrietta’s house.
We drove off toward Nashville to pick up our paychecks before heading home to California. All I could think about was the ache in my heart to run into the warm embrace of my mom and dad and get back to normal life. That’s how we all felt as we took turns at the wheel driving night and day, sometimes swerving off the road in our drowsiness to get home as quickly as possible and put that gnarly book-selling behind us.
That summer was the hardest summer of my life. I was rejected at hundreds of doorsteps, I cried on curbs, and I could never access the comfort of my family when things were hard. It was a time of condensed character building of all kinds – endurance, persistence, tenacity, hard work, perseverance, you name it – and I’ll never forget it.
A photo a nice woman took of me when I knocked on her door and she let me in – she mailed it to my parents
I sold enough books over two months to earn $10,000 for college, and even though most kids were able to use their final two weeks of delivering to sell even more books while I was sitting patiently in a restaurant and eating cereal to pass the time, I later found out that I had nevertheless placed 32nd out of 1,000 first-year sellers, and had earned an all-expenses-paid trip to Cancun.
The bus that picked us book sellers up at the Cancun airport
I never could have finished without Robin’s help. No one else was there. No other option existed. She stepped into my life to help me not because it was easy for her – it wasn’t; not because she knew me well – she didn’t; not because she got anything out of it. She made the choice to love me through her actions, period.
For that, I will never forget you, Robin.
All these years later, as we see each other’s lives distantly unfold in photos on Facebook and I see your beautiful girls – now grown women – I have only love in my heart for you.
Thank you for everything you did for me, a stranger – someone you didn’t know well and who was only in your life for a blink of an eye – who lives thousands of miles away but will always hold you dear. You lived out the following, Robin, and many more…
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
John 13:35
Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.
(I’m not implying I’m an angel – ha!) Hebrews 13:1-2
Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.
Romans 12:10
And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:19
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in…
Matthew 25:35
