Barbara Bennett Parsons

We met at the Roo at High Noon — Cherry, Barbara, and I.  We hadn’t seen one another for years — certainly not all of us together — but we decided it was a lunch long overdue.  It’s not just that Barbara now lives in Hoquiam.  It’s not just that Cherry is still “working” — well, it’s volunteering but it’s every day, everywhere, on a regular basis.  Like a job.  And it’s certainly not just that I seem to always have more on my plate than I can get to.  No. None of these.

Barbara Bennett Parsons lived on the Peninsula in the 1980s.  Perhaps you remember her North Head Gallery where she sold her father Elton Bennett’s artwork as well as the work of other artists, mostly local.  Cherry Harding worked in the Gallery and later would work in the Bookvendor — first for Gordon and later for us.  It seems as if we’ve known one another always but, really how did we meet??

Cherry Harding

We tried to reconstruct all that over sandwiches and rice and bean bowls but we got stuck on the dates.  “When did you come to the Peninsula?” I asked Cherry.  “Let’s see… maybe 1989…”  “Really?  Are you sure it wasn’t ’79?”  “No….”  And we all laughed.  In fact, we laughed and talked and remembered all through lunch and, suddenly, three hours had gone by!

Missing was Sharon VanHuiet,  now living in California in a care facility.  And Lucille Pierce who, at 97, has given up driving here from Portland… “Not that the drive is difficult,” she said when she last came on her own two years ago.  “It’s just that I get so sleepy.  I know to pull over and take a nap for 15 or 20 minutes and then I’m fine.  But I have to do that so often nowadays that it takes way too long to get to the beach!”  But she promises to come in summer when her daughter will be here to do the driving.

Gordon Schoewe (1926-2014)

And we lamented our friends who are no longer with us — Gordon Schoewe and Charles and Kaye Mulvey and, of course, Cherry’s Jack.  “Did you ever know Maureen Mulvey?” Barbara asked.  “Such a warm nurturing, wonderful woman.  When I was a shy little girl and came with my folks [Elton and Charles were good friends] she always had time to visit with me.  All by myself.  That was a huge gift!”

Just as this gift of friendship is huge, I thought!  How wonderful that we can stay connected.  We decided we’d do it again in the Spring — maybe four times a year would be good.  “If we can remember…” Cherry and I said.  We put Barbara in charge of scheduling.  She’s younger by at least a generation!

And, besides everything else, the lunch was terrific!