In a way, Vardit’s business has saved her customers too. They look to her for guidance, Vardit says, “A lot of time ladies come, and they’re lonely. They need attention…It’s important for me to make them feel better about themselves.”
One Nextdoor reviewer endorses the hairdresser’s wisdom so staunchly, her comment borders on menacing, “I strongly suggest you ask for her advice and then follow it.” When I probed Vardit for details, she quickly moved on, but not before saying, “I’m a therapist; I have to respect patient confidentiality.”
Vera Claeys
Vera moved to Davis, California, because she “met a dude” (before you ask, they’re still together). At first she hated California. She grew up in a Texas border town where people pull over on the road to help each other, and the local news has a weekly fishing report. She’s the sort of nearly extinct, sincere person who saves coffee grounds in a mason jar for her neighbor’s garden. Meanwhile, in Davis, no one even waved back at her.
Vera downloaded Nextdoor to find work, and within hours discovered a woman seeking a caretaker for her prideful mother, Miss Edie (Claeys requested I use a pseudonym for her), who was too embarrassed by her tremor to socialize in her assisted living home.
Vera cut up food and folded underwear for the very particular Miss Edie from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. One night, the Memphis-born, 100-year-old softened. “Steve Harvey is such a handsome man; what do you think?”
Over the next one and a half years, the two became each other’s closest companions. Vera was lonely and felt out of touch with herself. Miss Edie, who lost her husband two years prior, told her, “You and I are in the same fix.”
Vera got a job in San Francisco shortly after and attributes the boost in motivation to Miss Edie. “Miss Edie was my lifeline,” she tells me. “I was caregiving for her, but she also was for me.”
Samantha Weaver
Samantha is the sort of sentimental “super saver” who carries things from her childhood—a cotton candy machine, a colonial lamp—everywhere: from her parents’ home in the Bay Area to Annapolis, where she studied philosophy, and back to Oakland, where she’s lived for the past 10 years (with a quick stint in Italy somewhere in between).