A Story With a Moral But I Don’t Know What It Is

Last summer, Sully tried to get an old lady to pay him 25 cents so he could push her off a tree stump. He called to her as she walked past our house. 

“Hey! Do you want to come to our carnival?”

If you know Sully at all, you know how utterly astounding this is, even before the part where he wanted to push a brittle stranger off a tree stump. Because you know that Sully doesn’t talk to strangers. He barely talks to people he knows or likes. He’s a thinker, an observer. He’s shy. 

So just imagine my complete, total, straight-up, over-the-top SHOCK when I looked out my living room window and saw him speaking to someone he didn’t know. 

“Oh wow,” she was saying, beaming from ear to ear, “this sounds so fun! What kinds of rides do you have at your carnival?”

And I was thinking, this is cute! This is great! He’s being so brave and outgoing. I’ve never seen this side of him before.

And then he was saying, “You have to give me 25 cents to ride this one. You climb up onto this stump and I’ll try knock you off with this stick—“

And then I was saying, “Nope nope nope nope…” as I raced out the door to put an end to it. 

Sully was miffed, like I’d smashed his piggy bank and stolen the 25 cents from him directly. “She wanted to, Mom!”

That was the beginning of a series of money making schemes that didn’t quite pan out. A garage sale (but he had nothing he was willing to part with). A concert (but tickets were $600 a pop and no one could afford to go). Doing chores (but Mom and Dad are cheap and have this wacky idea that everyone who lives in a house should have to take care of it without being paid). I kept telling him, Sully, money doesn’t come that easy. You can’t just push people off tree stumps and expect them to pay you. It doesn’t work like that. 

And he just kept shrugging his tiny shoulders and brainstorming. I could not stop the brainstorming.

But oh well, right? This is how kids learn that money doesn’t grow on trees. That you have to have a skill or a great product, a marketing plan. You have to work for it, and you have to keep your expectations low. Brainstorm all you want, little buddy. You’re going to be broke forever.

So anyway, He came inside from playing with the neighbour kids a couple of weeks ago and asked if he could have some string. Like, a lot of string, as much string as I could find. And maybe some beads, if I had any.

If I had any. 

I was a 90s preteen. I hoarded that stuff. I used to wear ten necklaces at a time, and ten bracelets and ten anklets, all homemade except the one precious hemp choker my best friend gave me for my birthday with the glow bead and the dangly dolphin charm which I am pretty sure she got at Rings n Things in Swift Current. 

(Rings n Things was where the cool people worked and shopped. I was not cool but when I went in there, 12 years old and heart-wrenchingly geeky, I felt just the tiniest bit less uncool. And when I wore that hemp choker with the glow bead and the dangly dolphin charm, oh man. Top. Of. The. World.)

Anyway.

I presented my son with my Caboodle makeup case, which had never, ever stored makeup (I never did become cool, not in my entire high school career). It contained roughly one hundred thousand beads. He was pumped.

“What are you doing with these?” I asked.

“We’re going to make friendship bracelets,” he said. “Me and my friends. We’re going to sell them to the neighbours.”

“Do you know how to make bracelets?” I asked, frowning, thinking of the complicated knots I used to tie, the hemp hooked around my pinky toe. 

“No,” he said. “Just gonna cut these up and put beads on ‘em.”

“Okay.”

So he took off with all my beads and all my string and spent the next week ‘making bracelets.’ 

On Saturday, he informed me that it was time. They had made a sales table. They had taped all of the bracelets to it. They were going to sit on the lawn until someone came by, and they were going to sell these bracelets for $5 a piece. I bit my tongue, wondering if I should encourage them to lower the price, to remind them that we live on a quiet street, that they might not make any money, that I was so proud of them anyway, even if no one bought their bracelets. I even went down there and spent $5 of my hard-earned cash on a bracelet that Scarlett made, three strands of pink and purple and white, threaded with beads that spelled out, ykshtleknd. 

They stayed out there all morning, and some of the afternoon. By about 1 o’clock, they were wandering away from their sales table, occasionally returning to it to see if anyone was lined up waiting to buy a bracelet. They went back the next day, too, for a couple of hours, but mostly lost interest in standing around.

It felt like a quiet couple of days, and I prepared myself to comfort Sully and Scarlett when they came in at the end of it, lamenting all of that time and effort for such little pay-off. I was so proud of them, I was going to say, for all the hard work they’d put in. Maybe I’d even take them for ice cream. And hey! I knew, for sure, that they’d gotten $5 from my sale. That’s a lot of money to little kids! Maybe that would be enough. I hoped so.

Well. 

They didn’t seem all that upset when they came in. Their faces were flushed, they were talking loud and fast, yelling over each other. 

They had fistfuls, literal fistfuls, I am not kidding, of money. 

These kids made $200 selling string to strangers on my neighbor’s front lawn.

The moral of the story is…

Something. I don’t know. What is it? You tell me.