Memorial
Cara Crocker (May 14, 1970-June 16, 2024)
Cara was my closest post-college friend in St. Louis. We didn’t meet at Webster University, although the time we were each enrolled there overlapped. Perhaps we passed each other in a hallway or on a sidewalk on campus. One summer, she had a job I had coveted as an undergraduate: working in the costume shop for Opera Theater of St. Louis, which was on the campus of Webster University.
But that’s not how we truly met. I was one of a team of temp workers hired to help rearrange Cloth World, a tiny fabric shop across the street from Hampton Village in South St. Louis. Joanne Fabrics had just taken over Cloth World, and it had to change its look. Depending on how we worked, some of us were kept on to become regular part time employees in the shop. Meanwhile, around the same time — or shortly afterwards — I also became a part-time employee at the B. Dalton Booksellers (now a noodle shop) in Hampton Village.
Cara wasn’t a member of the original crew — she was hired shortly after Cloth World reopened, when it was in need of staff. One day when Cara and I were working at the cutting table, a customer bit my head off for not folding her fabric perfectly. (I’m neurodivergent, and we weren’t trained to fold fabric neatly — it wasn’t like the independent fabric shops I’ve frequented in Portland, Oregon, in the twenty-first century). This was a…