Always attend weddings and funerals.
Do not neglect your thank you notes.
Follow the golden rule.
These represent a partial list of my best, and sometimes idealistic, intentions in this life.
I might also add:
Pet cats lazing on the sidewalk.
Give stranded drivers a jump-start.
Always run through green fields of sprinklers.
Do not ignore lemonade stands run by children.
This last one is especially important, because when I fail on other items, say on the rare occasion that I am wearing clothing unfit for sprinkler running, it is improbable that I will forgo a proffer of lemonade, especially if it comes from a child in a checkered camisole with braided hair, especially if she has a pony-tailed companion who stands beside her holding a hand-lettered sign.
While I have long since retired from summer lemonade sales, I remember well the feeling of anticipation with every potential customer. Does he look overheated? Is he carrying change? Is that the type of person who would stop for lemonade no matter what his destination?
A hush would fall over us, and we would straighten our table, setting out cups just in case. Then, with the eyes of a puppy at treat time, we would watch our approaching stranger, willing a generous disposition upon him.
I did not take many things seriously before my entrance into middle school. I dabbled in a co-ed soccer league, took piano lessons, but avoided my scales like a container of unappealing leftovers. I hated my dance classes so much that I sometimes made myself physically ill dreading the mere forty-five minutes I spent in the studio each week. Lemonade stands, on the other hand, were a different story. If I took trick-or-treating seriously, insisting on an early departure and late return, sorting and resorting my bounty, then my best friend Nicole and I embraced lemonade sales with the vivacity of an open flame to wood shavings. Give us some materials and you’d be hard-pressed to reign in our excitement.
Looking back at the age of ten or eleven, we would laugh about the days of lemonade stands past—our first one with a cardboard box for a table, a single pitcher and cups, one measly sign leaned up against our table, and the two of us sitting behind our box on two shrunken sticker-ed chairs.
“Try selling it for 10 cents,” Nicole’s mom suggested. “You’ll underbid the competition that way.”
We spent half a summer this way: just two girls and their pitcher. Once, at the end of what seemed like hours of selling, we squandered all hard-earned eighty-six cents on a fudgesicle from the ice cream truck. It rolled onto our street, a metallic sounding Yankee Doodle plinking from its speakers. In the seconds it took the truck to travel the half a block to our stand, panic overtook us as we debated the dilemma before us. Resist the irresistible–an ice cream truck so close we could have licked its treat-printed side? Or squander our meager profits on the promise of happiness?
Regret was already tugging at my throat as we surrendered our savings to a man in a crisp suit. With only money enough to buy one, we shared the fudgesicle between us. Chocolate dripped beguilingly down our forearms and dried on the stick but it tasted only of deceit.
Following our discouragement, we sought to revamp our advertising strategy. As the proud owner of vast supply of tiny penguin stickers, some with their flippers raised, some seeming to teeter on an invisible edge, I rethought our poster design. The penguins became an advertising constant, lined up on our signs along a marker-drawn ice-berg, diving one-by-one into a pale yellow pool of “ICE COLD LEMONADE.”
What followed was surely our golden age. Lemonade stands were a neighborhood affair, a festival of children in swimming suits and bare feet. After someone brought cookies to contribute to the sales, no stand was complete with out a preliminary trip to the corner store to buy a pack of sandwich cookies. We were ever on the lookout for ways to expand our enterprise. We began to sell friendship bracelets alongside food, someone began drawing pictures, someone else began making bouquets—whatever we could think of. In some of our later years, we introduced what somewhat erroneously called “advertising metro buses,” an operation headed by our younger siblings, who, on their bikes would take to the nearby streets calling “ICE COLD LEMONADE! TEN CENTS A CUP!” Our messengers would return from their travels sweaty and breathing heavily, park their bikes on a spot in the front lawn with signs saying “metro bus parking” and reach unabashedly for the pitcher.
Indeed, it was no secret that the majority of our sales went to neighborhood kids, who all seemed to know of my parent’s change bowl, a hollow stump my mom once built in a mother-daughter ceramics class. Every few minutes someone’s younger brother would disappear into our house and return with a dime, having stood on tiptoe to reach the shiny stump. The Dayton Street lemonade stand was an internal operation sustained largely by the change stump, but it was one that my mother didn’t mind supporting, at least not enough to hide all the change.
On certain days, we had competition. Rory, our across-the-street neighbor, sold lemonade just outside his front door. He was probably no more than twelve, but at the time we thought him ancient–a reprehensible phony in the world of lemonade standing. He seemed to swagger even when he sat, his legs spread wide with one outstretched down three concrete steps. He had no table. No set-up. No sign. He would just call out his wares. “What an embarrassment to the industry,” we thought, “no charm. And no passion at all.” He may as well have been smoking a cigar, we decided, with as little as it looked like he cared about his business. Just a man and two jugs, one with water from which he drew regular swigs, one with lemonade to be he sold. We glared at him and pitied the thirsty passersby who had naively chosen to tread his side of the street.
Rory, sitting casually on his stoop, probably had no idea his presence was a call-to-battle–that with his every customer, we quietly seethed and in whispered voices, plotted his demise. Lucky for Rory, we were not so ruthless in our actions as we were in our plans. While we often threatened to spread the word that he sometimes drank lemonade straight from his selling jug, we never brought him down in the colossal confrontation we sometimes imagined—a face-off of glacial proportions, where there would be no shortage of lemonade shed.
Our disdain for Rory and his minimalist sales made one thing clear: It had become unfathomable to us that there was any purpose in holding a lemonade stand without the hullabaloo—absurd that anyone would want to just sell lemonade. Such a simple-minded paradigm was rife with missed opportunity, we were certain. Of course, by that point, a somewhat elitist dichotomy was already emblazoned on my mind. There are two kinds of sellers: those who know how to hold a lemonade stand and there are those who do not care.
For years to follow, I would pull up alongside road-side stands, eager to vicariously revisit my own selling days, but would always face disappointment. “Fifty cents?” I would silently scoff. “At this ramshackle operation? Honey, at some point you have got to learn that that cute face will only get you so far.” The six year old stand owner would stare back at me with a smile, her slim arms tan like honey, hair curling delicately around her temples.
In July, while visiting a farmer’s market in Columbus, we took an alternate route back when we spotted two children parked behind a table, their sign boasting a reasonable 25 cents for lemonade. The sellers were no more than three—the girl, a wispy blonde in a sun dress and jelly shoes, the boy slightly younger with large watchful eyes. As she began to spoon ice into our cups, their mother stepped out of the front door and sat in a chair beside the stand. She helped them to pick up the pitcher as I resisted the urge to whisper to the girl that her young brother might better serve as an advertising agent. “He can ride a bike, can’t he?” “Just with training wheels? Really? Well, that could still work.”
Adorable, they certainly were, and their set-up was altogether respectable. Starting so young, they will surely blossom. In the meantime, I do hope I am carrying a twenty-dollar bill when I encounter a lemonade stand that surpasses all my hopes and expectations. It might not seem like much, but with that kind of profit, we could have bought ice cream treats for everyone—three times over at least!
