Baskin-Robbins

Although Christians should always be part of a local church, I didn’t make it a priority. I tried one in Southgate but for some reason, I just didn’t pursue it. It’s not that I was angry at God. In fact, I very much felt God’s closeness and comfort through my struggle, more so than at any time before. Accordingly, I didn’t really make any friends. But as I was a natural introvert, I thought of myself as alone but not lonely.

Once again, with the new company, there was a lag time getting paid for savings plans that I sold. But for the canvassing teams you got paid right after your shifts. As I was getting desperate, I asked to do some of that too. 

There was no YWAM presence in London at that time but there were several bases surrounding the city. One of the bases was just north in the town of Harpenden. Lynn Green (who had given the Live in Loving Relationships message that had been so instrumental in my life) lived at the Harpenden base. He was actually the leader for all of YWAM Europe.

As my father was a leader in YWAM, I had met Lynn from time to time growing up so he knew who I was. I called him up to ask if we could meet. He was very kind and sympathetic. Despite my protests, he also gave me some money. His counsel was to find a job that had more reliable income, even if it didn’t necessarily promise amazing potential. And that’s what I did. I found a job in the newspaper classifieds at the ice cream shop Baskin-Robbins.

While working in an ice-cream shop didn’t offer great financial remuneration or much potential for the future, this one did have its perks. The store was actually part of not one but two movie theaters, both in the very center of London where I got to see any movie that was playing. 

One of them was the Plaza Theatre, a four-screen theater just down Regent Street from Piccadilly. The theater was on a corner lot and the Baskin-Robbins was right on the corner behind large glass walls. We could serve people in the theater or on the street through a large portal-shaped opening. That turned out to be quite cold in the winter.

The other theater was about a ten minute walk from the Plaza in what I discovered to be the best movie theater on the planet - the Empire - right on Leicester Square. It was a three bears type of theater. They had a small baby bear theater, a medium-sized theater and the third had the biggest screen I had ever seen with state of the art sound. 

The Baskin-Robbins was to the left of the entrance. You had to enter the theater to get behind the counter but the storefront opened right onto the Square and it was a very wide opening to make it easy and inviting for customers. Another great benefit was that Lady Diana came to movie premieres in theaters on Leicester Square and the Empire was one of them. She came to two while I worked there. Huge crowds would gather to get a glimpse and ice cream was not on their minds. We would wait until just before she came, grab our tall stools, jump over the counter and stand up behind the crowd on the stools from where we got a great view.

I worked as much as I could, at least six days a week. When I did that, I found that I was making enough for my rent, my transportation and could put some aside. One day, I mentioned to my landlady how much I was able to save every month and she indicated that some people she knew were charging much more for boarders than I was paying and that didn’t include food. I’m sure she was trying to get me to offer to pay more but I didn’t go there. I knew I was paying more than enough to pay for the cost of living there so I didn’t feel obliged.

I was grateful for what she was doing for me but I probably wasn’t the best boarder. I tried to help her when I could. I mowed the grass in the back yard and I helped her bring in the groceries if I was home. Her bedroom was on the second floor but since she had physical difficulties, she spent a lot of time in the living room on the bottom floor where she watched a lot of TV. I wasn’t much of a TV person but I would sit and watch with her if she had made a meal.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more