Community: Little Sweeties Cakery
Often business owners are pitted against each other and seen as rivals. Competiton, if you will. But it doesn’t have to be that way. More often that not, many of us are friends. Our relationships go much deeper than what you see in line or behind the counter.
I think of the Johnson family who own Little Sweeties Cakery across town. It all started when I was ten years old…
I met Pamela when I was ten years old. She turned ten a few weeks later. At age ten, you don’t care about things such as skin color. It was summer of 1998 in Cheyenne Wyoming, and our little street was the happening place. That translated to there were a bunch of kids stuffed into small houses with no central air.
Being a parent now, I understand more about what it must have been like. Nowadays I’m not sure if I could usher my kids out the front door and not see them until dinner time. But those were different times. We explored the neighborhood and rode our bikes for miles on end. When her mom had a stroke one day, she and her sister came to my house to stay. My mom let us make our own pizzas out of tortillas. I don’t know why that memory sticks with me. We practiced our clarinets in the evening together. Looking back, our parents probably wanted to throw those woodwinds into the river because we sounded more like squawking birds of prey than anything resembling music in those days.
Pam and I played rec basketball together every chance we could get at the base youth center. We could either be found there or at the movie theater. She introduced me to Destiny’s Child and Sisqo. We played in her backyard and admired her mother’s antiques and treasures in the living room. We watched all of the latest movies because her dad worked at the base theater some nights, so we were always in the know.
But then I moved away. I was suddenly transplanted from the blizzard region of the United States to the beach six weeks before school ended. Pam sent me a yearbook from our seventh-grade junior high school and got all of my friends to sign it. I still have that yearbook. These were the days before social media.
Pam moved to Warner Robins (Georgia) not long after. She and her family came to visit us one day in Florida. We were both wearing makeup and dressed differently than we had at twelve years old, but I knew her voice the moment I heard her walk into the living room. I’m sure I looked quite different from our days wearing snowsuits and puffy jackets. On the beach I wore tank tops and anklets and a puka shell necklace. I still played basketball at the rec center near our house, but I’d traded the clarinet in for a drum set.
Pam excelled in Georgia. She said it was a small town, but everyone was nice. She added that I probably wouldn’t like it because there wasn’t a beach right across the street like there was in Florida. I presumed that she was probably right. But lo and behold if my USAF father didn’t get stationed in that same little Georgia town not long after that conversation. If time made good on its promises, Pam and I would end up graduating together after all.
My first day of eleventh grade was hard, but Pam was there after school asking me how the day went. She invited me to her birthday party and I was one of the few white girls there. I remember feeling out of place, but everyone was kind. I realized that that was how Pam had probably felt growing up in Wyoming. She was always the only person of color in her class. I had never noticed, but I’m sure she had. We never talked about it.
We did graduate high school together and I am so lucky to be able to say that they supported Between Friends Coffee from the beginning. We’ve traded in our basketball shoes for aprons now. We chase our kids instead of the latest band blowing up the billboard charts.
I got a call a year or so ago asking questions about opening their own bakery in town. If you haven’t been there, you should check it out right away. Mrs. Johnson has made my birthday cakes since I was a child. Just last week I heard a voice behind me in line. “I’ve known that voice since I was ten years old,” I grinned.
And there she was, just the same as she has always been.
Between Friends Coffee is located at 1080 Hwy 96 (Suite 100) in Warner Robins, GA.
Little Sweeties Cakery is located at 585 Carl Vinson Pkwy (Suite 400) in Warner Robins, GA.
