Life can be hard, but it goes on

Business is risky, even far away from Wall Street.

Life is, too. We're going through a nasty period that challenges our inclination, maybe our need, to believe life is normally a paved road.

The thing is, you have to be grateful when life is running smoothly, because mostly it is constructed of bumps and sometimes mountains.

We take health for granted until we get sick. We don't think about death until it hits nearby.

Wall Street isn't the only place where stuff happens.

I stopped at a little deli Friday, and the next day it was closed.

Villa Victoria, a Mexican deli in Columbia City, closed just a few days shy of its first anniversary.

Maybe if the economy had been better it would have survived, but maybe not.

Small businesses flounder all the time. Running a small business can be like rowing a small boat in a downpour. Owners have to row and bail constantly to stay afloat, and there are no golden life vests.

"We opened at precisely the wrong time," Naomi Andrade Smith told me.

The deli was her creation, and it was more than a business.

Smith uses recipes her mother brought from her home state of Michoacán, adding some of the foods her father liked. His African-American family migrated to Mexico, where the two families and two cultures blended.

Last week, I bought some comfort food: tamales and collard greens. Where else will I find that combination?

Smith and her husband, Ken Steiner, said the deli's location on a side street was bad for business. But it didn't help that at the time they went into debt to open the shop, prices for all the foods they use — rice, corn, meat — soared. And now is certainly no time to ask for another loan.

Smith ran a deli in Madrona for three years before she decided to move into a better space nearby.

That was five years ago, but just as she found a spot and secured a loan, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

During her recovery, old customers kept asking her to start cooking again. So last year she did, choosing Columbia City because of the buzz about its growth. She thought hard times were behind her.

"I thought it was all over, but it wasn't," Smith said.

The deli held its own at first, but business started falling off as the economy worsened.

Still, she says, "I am alive, and I have all this potential to excel."

She and her husband own a building on Rainier Avenue South. It's where she did the cooking for the deli. She plans to sell frozen tamales and other dishes from there a couple of days a week starting sometime this month. And she will continue catering (www.villa-victoria.net.)

Hit a bump, adjust course and keep going.

A couple of nights ago, the UW business school held a panel discussion on the national economic crisis.

On the way out, a guy who'd come to hear the experts told me: "All I wanted to know is if my CDs are going to be safe."

They're fine, I said. Government insurance. Even if they weren't, life would go on.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.