Sloane, Author at The STUFF Sisters

Waiting

From the beginning of my Dad’s cancer diagnosis, I was waiting on that little ray of sunshine to bless us all. I didn’t care what form it took – better than average test results, a glimmer in a doctor’s eye, or just general good news. I wasn’t going to be picky. I was going to be patient.

Then the call came from Casey, who traveled with him for his first treatment at MD Anderson in Houston. All had gone as planned. The good news: his doctor was putting him in the 90th percentile for complete remission.

ceylon et cie sculpture — I found this in Architectural Digest last month. It's stunning. It is brass and turquoise and stands on a clear lucite cube.

There will be very few rays of sunshine as he moves through six months of chemotherapy. Rest assured, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for every single one.

Sloane

Circus Act

My sister Casey and I have never studied with Ringling Brothers. I’m sure it would be time well spent at their school in Sarasota, Florida.

We have, however, spent countless hours perfecting our own style of retail circus performance. Standing on a ladder that’s a bit too short for the task with one leg resting on the ladder and the other on a 7 foot tall cabinet for support while you heft a 4′ x 6′ canvas off the wall with both hands. Or, climbing under a table that’s a bit too heavy to carry fully loaded the 4 inches you need it to move and arching your back to make contact with the underside so as to lift the entire table into its designated spot.

Both of these moves, and many others too risky to mention here in case our insurance agents are reading, always have a spotter. You know. A trained professional to help problem solve and call 911. STUFF has two of those on staff. Me and Casey.

This, however, is my favorite of Casey’s recent fantastic feats. She’s so far off the ground and she is relying on the ball to keep her safe. She makes it look effortless and simple.

I won’t try this one myself. I’m too scared. Besides, if she keeps doing this all day every day and I’m her spotter, when will I have time to learn?

Sloane

Split Personality

I was told that living with a teenager is like living with multiple people in one body. Mothers of girls say it’s worse than with boys.

I can only speak of the young man I’m living with right now. Well, I can only speak of all three of him.

Sloane

Fed Up

I’m breaking down. I’m worn slick. I can’t take another minute. I’m fed up. The sun needs to come out now and stay out for more than 5 minutes. My vitamin D is lacking, and I am a shade of pale I have never been before.

llbean bags — The large long handle would be my choice today.

When I start to feel this way, my mind turns to blue. The color, not the emotion. So today I visited a place that always makes me happy – the LL Bean Boat & Tote page on their website. I seldom buy bags that I design, but I do enjoy the process and their blues make me very happy. I won’t be buying a bag anytime soon. Just knowing that I had so many blues to choose from calmed me down.

I have written about blue before. My previous musings can be found here.

Sloane

Silence

One evening last winter – not the one that ended yesterday when the sun rose in its glory, but the winter of 2009-2010 – I was sitting in my darkened office at STUFF. I like working at night when the store is closed and the lights are off. I turn on just one task light over my desk, and I attack the minutia of retail. To say I was diligently working on the brain-numbing details of inventory would actually be correct. I was so close to finishing that task, and I had come in after the store was closed to have total silence and full reign.

Then the phone rang. The voice on the other end said, “Your husband says you’re working very hard, but I want you to come and have drinks with me at the girl’s night I just threw together.” I hemmed, I hawed, I bandied about the “I’m so close to finishing and I really need to work because I’m a self-employed business woman and this is what we do” speech. It fell on deaf ears, and I was in my car a few minutes later heading to exactly where the beckoning had sprung from.

My friend Missy had pulled together a wonderful group of women that evening. She says she “threw” it together, but it really seemed to have come together as if by magic. The women I met that night were a mixed bunch to me. Some I knew by name and some I met that night for the first time, but one woman was in the nether region between the those two. She was a dear friend to Missy. She and I had been introduced numerous times at Bar Natasha, and I had seen her perform professionally on many stages in Kansas City. But that night, we talked – about kids and husbands and friends and commitments and responsibility. She is someone you don’t forget easily – her eye contact very focused, her laughter extremely contagious, and her singing voice coming from her whole body, not just her lungs.

And today, while I was sitting in my fully lit office, the phone rang. Missy told me that her dear friend Karen had died very early this morning. The cancer that had re-visited her body – and this time aggressively – had won. I was speechless for a minute. Missy and I continued to talk, and we re-confirmed with each other our deep hatred for cancer. Many other things were said, like “I love you” and “Take care”. Then we hung up and went back to doing. Doing things. Tasks. Work.

There was a silencing in my universe today of a voice I will never hear again. I can fill that silence with peace. I can fill that silence with hope. I can fill that silence with friendship.

I will do all of those things after I live in that silence for a bit longer.

Sloane

I grabbed this photo from Missy’s facebook page without her permission. She’ll forgive me.

Keepsakes

My husband has a unique name: Harl A. Van Deursen. When we married, I did not take his name. I liked my name just the way it was, and, to this day, he will tell you he wishes he had bucked the status quo and taken my name.

Sloane and Harl, August 1981 — Here we are, the happy couple in August of 1981. I may have been, like most young girls, writing his name mingled with mine in a "practice" signature. Alas, common sense won out five years later when we married.

His unique name made for very interesting direct mail, and I started saving mailing labels 20 years ago from credit card companies and those just generally wanting us to commit to a product, sale or promotion. These labels still make me laugh out loud and, occasionally, I add a doozy to the binder clip. A general sampling:

Van Harl

Harl Harl Van

Carl Bandeursen

Harl Vandevresen

H. Van Van

Harz Van Dee

Reich Barl Van Deursen

Van Sloane Deursen

Lately I find myself keeping great spam email because sometimes I can’t stop laughing – not only at the subject line, but at the thought of who actually opens these missives from the ether. (I can assure you I don’t. They are safely locked in my special spam folder and are virtually untouched.) Most of the good ones are sex related, and please stop reading now if you are faint of heart.

My current subject line favorites:

ELECTtrifying bed-action

be her wild banger

Want a King banana down there?

BECOME A MATING CHAMPION!

Some magic for your wand.

Torpedo her ALL night

make your woody outstanding!!

Stress Cooling Lovemaking?

BANG Ladies Like Crazy

(All capitalization and punctuation has been left intact from the originals.)

Casey is a little fed up with my cackling, but she seldom fails to bite and ask, “What’s so funny?” Mass marketing hasn’t really changed that much with the advent of electronic mail. My husband and I knew not to give much heed to a company that not only didn’t know our names but mixed them liberally. And, as a heterosexual female, the spam I receive daily doesn’t warrant a click.

If you want to talk me into something, know a little bit about me. Now, that’s true marketing.

Sloane

The Big Time

This past week while we were in New York City, we ran into a friend from home in one of the long aisles at the convention center.

There it was. A rack of Zippernut Press cards. So pretty. So tall. So ripe for the picking.

STUFF can no longer state emphatically that these homegrown cards are “only available at our store” because other stores in the nation can now get in on the sweet action. These cards are very, very funny and it’s past time for them to be in the limelight. We will still have the nation’s largest Zippernut collection – especially of the cards dedicated to cancer that benefit cancer research at the KU Cancer Center – and we are ready for this wild ride to continue.

Kansas City knows how to grow an entrepreneur, and we’d like to think that we had a part in making this dream come true for this local artist.

Sloane

Alignment

I did not have the best day on Friday. Nothing bad happened directly to me. I just never caught my breath or reached my stride. I did not accomplish what I set out to do, and, by the time I got home, I was wiped out from too much discombobulation to my life that day. All visions of what my day was to have been when I started it were blurry and tattered. I was so emotionally tired that, for the first time in years, I had a “come apart”. (I picked this phrase up from my friend Karen Townsend years ago, and it just hit home as a great pairing of words.)

The incredible thing about my low point last evening was that, right before I let the tears fly at the kitchen table, I received a “just catching up with you” call from my best friend. She was making sure I had made it through the week and that all was well. Remarkably, however, within an hour of of drying my tears, I received two more calls from cherished women in my life who were also just making sure I was OK – one to ask me to lunch next week and the other to see about drinks yet that night. These women do not really know each other and definitely do not know each other’s phone numbers. Therefore, this wasn’t a planned circling of the wagons – this was some form of karmic, one-day-past-the-full-moon intervention.

Earlier this past week, I was part of a circling of the wagons as my mother endured another breast cancer surgery. So really, in contrast to her week, I had very little to be tired of or fed-up about. I wasn’t still flushing anesthesia and pain killers out of my systems, and I wasn’t dealing with the loss of any body parts and their cancer cells. I think I was just done with that one day.

Now I’m better. Actually, I was better as soon as I stopped sobbing and wiped the tears with a dish towel. Once I released all my pent-up crap into the ether, I felt a great weight lift, and I moved right on through my night with my husband and son.

I’m thinking what I experienced was an alignment that was buffered delicately by three women who just knew something was wrong in the universe. They set out to make it right.

Cathy, Brigid and Missy, I’m all right now. Really.

Sloane

Horn Tooting

I haven’t always worked in retail. It is really, in business jargon, my second career. A career that I love, warts and all.

Previous to this stellar gig and after a short college career, I worked for a small advertising agency for two years, and then I was a political consultant for 13 years. Each of these jobs was full of horn tooting for my clients – media releases, television interviews, radio advertising. I honed my skills for getting to the root of the issue/cause and sharing that with the world. Please remember, STUFF has been in business 14 years, so the work I did in those businesses was before the advent of the Internet, Facebook and Twitter. Actually, while at the advertising job, I remember vividly when they purchased their first computer and moved the IBM Selectric III typewriters to the edge of the desks. Heck, right before that, the whole world sped up with the advent of the fax machine. Yep. I’m that old.

So it was with a rather experienced hand that Casey and I began the job of sharing with the world STUFF’s achievements. At times, I struggle with it, because I’d much rather talk about the artists we represent than the business directly. I’d rather talk about artistic processes than award nominations.

This week, we learned that STUFF was nominated for an award at the Dallas Market Center and that we were placed in the top 10 – those being the lucky few to move forward in the award process. I had had an inkling this was coming, because I had received a phone call from a marketing person in Dallas to ask me some “follow-up questions regarding our submission”, and I was struck dumb for a few moments because we didn’t nominate ourselves and had never seen a submission. We had been nominated by a sales representative for a company whose work we carry, and she had pushed our name into their sights because she was amazed by how much STUFF has given to charities in Kansas City. The award she nominated us for is titled “The Next Big Give” and is about small retail stores being involved in their own communities.

She’s right. We were a good fit for this award, and we are honored to have made the top 10. STUFF has a firm commitment to the neighborhood our business resides in, a passion for the city of Kansas City, and a dedication to the not-for-profit institutions that make this city tick and are central to its health. In the past year, we have sponsored events in our store and been involved with events for over 50 local schools and charities. In addition to that financial involvement, Casey and I have been directly involved with fundraising committees and are serving on the board of directors for six local institutions to help those organizations continue to flourish. STUFF also has developed a line of clothing and hats that celebrate the Brookside neighborhood, and a portion of every sale of those items goes to fund more benches and bike racks in Brookside.

Winning an award would be sweet. Winning an award in Dallas would be nice. But the number one thing that’s important to us is giving back to our community and knowing that we are part of the solutions for our city. When governments and their citizens experience financial crisis, basic human needs are usually the first to suffer – health care, education, safe transportation. When we opened our doors 14 years ago, our country wasn’t in a financial recession but we knew that civic involvement would be central to our mission. You can’t spend every working hour building a business based on representing local artists and turn your back on the communities that they, your business (and you!) reside in.

The response to our core mission from the people who shop at our store continues to humble us. They believe as solidly as we do in doing what you can locally to see a change globally. The community is our business. STUFF has made sure to be involved with institutions and organizations that not only meet a set of criteria but that also embrace our mission. We’ve made sure that our helping them is a good fit all around.

In our world, it really isn’t about the win — it’s about being in the game, celebrating a good time, and having good sportsmanship.

There. I tooted our horn.

Sloane

Out With the Old

Two weeks before Christmas, the TV refused to turn on. And, yes, I consulted our in-house computer and electronics guru and, after testing all the connections – the plug, the wall outlet, the remote, the batteries, the video connections and the power strip – his official pronouncement was, “It’s dead.”

Why do appliances break at the holidays? Why does the dishwasher flood and then cease to work the day before the Thanksgiving meal you are serving for 20? Why does the guest bathroom faucet seize up just days before a house full of overnight guests? Is is karma? Is it Murphy’s law? Or is it secretly-implanted switches that the plumbers and dishwasher repairmen install? Switches only they can see. High quality ones from the CIA.

We have one TV in our house. It is exactly the way we like it: safely ensconced in its Arts & Crafts cabinet holding down the west side of the living room. When it’s not turned on, nice and solid cherry doors cover the hideousness that all TVs inherently carry in their gene pool. And the spaciousness that is provided in front of the cabinet makes for the Wii bowling alley and the Super Mario Cart race track.

So, when the TV died we had to replace it – although I spent a few days truly pondering life without and was happy for those few moments. But then I remembered that Mad Men on Netflix had made us very happy recently, much as Blues Clues on Nickelodeon had made the youngest amoung us wide-eyed 10 years ago.

I guess I really can’t complain. The old TV had been with us for 23 or 24 years. We purchased it either right after our wedding with what probably seemed like a huge pile of cash or as a gift to each other on our first anniversary. Whenever it was, the old mother had gotten larger and heavier since we moved into this house after she took up residence in said cabinet. It was a trip to carry her out of the house, with my husband and me bitching and groaning. After a long day in retail in December, the last thing you want to see in the living room is a huge hunk of petrified plastic and glass waiting to find its place in electronics heaven. (To be honest with you, I don’t know how my husband got it from the cabinet to the end table by himself. Maybe he didn’t, because we haven’t rushed to the emergency room for a hernia flare up.)

Either the “breakdown timing switch” in this old sucker – the CIA worked with Sony, RCA and Zenith on this technology in the 60s – was never flipped on, or we were lucky and Murphy was on our side this time. I go with the lucky scenario. I was even luckier because, in the last 24 years, TVs have gotten considerably lighter, and my husband was able to hunt, gather and install the flat screen replacement all by himself while I was at work. Just in time for Santa to bring us Beatle’s Rock Band.

Sloane

PS…You can’t hide the ugliness of Rock Band behind beautifully designed cabinetry. But you gotta love Santa for the almost well designed, faux leather, Rock Band branded storage ottoman. But I digress.