Fire Up The Rye Bread

My Sons The Entrepreneurs

I guess it started with those cartoons that show kids selling lemonade for 10 cents a glass from home made wooden booths on their front lawns.  My sons saw that at a very tender age and each in his own way began to cultivate and refine entrepreneurial skills which would haunt me through the years.  These skills are still being honed to a fine edge and the wheeling and dealing over things like writeable CDs, blank cassette tapes (what are those?) and even articles of clothing would make any free enterpriser’s heart beat just a little faster.  Here’s a sample:

Son a:  “so could you burn me a couple of CDs?  It won’t take you long.”

Son b: “well, I dunno, there’s a lot of wear and tear on my burner and it takes

quite a bit of time.”

            Son a:  “I’ll give you that old Metallica CD that you like.”

            Son b:  “well OK, I’ll do it if you throw in a bus ticket.”

            Son a:  “hey wait, you still owe me a bus ticket from last week”

            Son b:  “Ok, I’ll take the Metallica CD but you have to buy the blanks.”

Son a: “so what about my bus ticket?”

The argument went on from there but you get the idea.  And, by the way, it lasted four times as long as it would have taken to burn the CDs.

            While I’m on the subject of CDs – here’s one for you.  I needed to buy some CDRs so I asked my youngest where would be a good place to purchase them.  He told me about a store that had them on sale for $9.95 a ten pack.  When I told him I didn’t think I needed ten he offered to sell me a couple for $1.75 each.  I bought a ten pack.

            My oldest is the opposite.  He undervalues everything.  I managed to intercept a deal that would have had his entire sports card collection (worth about $75.00 at the time) going to a friend for the princely sum of two dollars.  When I asked him why so little, he told me what a nice guy his friend was.  I bought them for $10.00.  Before you get furious with me, let me tell you that they have been stored in my closet for about ten years and when I think he won’t sell them to someone at a price based on the buyer’s personality, I’ll give them back to him.  I may have to buy a safe for them soon the way they are appreciating in value.

            There was a time when my two younger sons had feet that were so small I could still borrow their shoes.  I’ll quickly point out that this is not a good practice after more than a couple of weeks of ownership.  By the way, I take a size twelve.  Now both of them wear shoes that are much too big for me.  But to return to my story . . .

            My youngest bought a pair of safety shoes from his older brother for $40.00.  They gave him blisters on his heels so he got his mother to sew and glue in a couple of pads.   This procedure worked very well, however, he quit the job that required the safety shoes and moved on to bigger and better things.

            These safety shoes look like expensive running shoes and they really weren’t exhibiting any signs of wear and tear.  Since my runners were starting to fall off my feet, I offered to buy them after assuring myself that they were still hygienically safe to wear.

He said, “How does $50.00 sound?”

            I told him it sounded outrageous since I knew he had paid his brother $40.00 several months ago.

            “Oh, but they’re not the same, he said.  “I had special pads put in them.”

            “Forty bucks!”  I yelled at him.

            “OK,” he said quickly and I immediately realized that I’d still agreed to pay more than I should have.    

            When I was young, my father told me about a friend of his who, every week when he gave his kids their $1.00 allowance, made popcorn and sold it to them for 25 cents a bag.  Back then I thought it was absolutely terrible.  Now I look at it sadly as a missed opportunity.

Another Day Of Surprises

Raising children is not a major project.  It is thousands of major projects, many seeming individual and small, until you get started.  Some take only seconds – those are the easiest to mess up.  Some take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.  Many of them are never finished, even when you think they are.  The saving virtue of it all, if there is any, is that it’s never dull.  I’ve used a lot of different words to describe the way I felt but bored is certainly not one of them.  So here, with apologies to none and a tear of remembrance in my eye, are a few of these small and quite exciting, surprises.

My oldest when he was about five, came home from the neighbor’s one afternoon with paint thinner on his breath.  Our neighbors were wonderful people but the father just never quite found it necessary to hide toxic chemicals or dangerous sharp instruments where little kids couldn’t get at them.  His two sons were older than ours by quite a bit and were beyond the stage of putting everything smaller than a ’67 Chev in their mouths. My son thought paint thinner might be a nice drink, I suppose and I’m sure at his age, he thought the skull and crossbones on the faded label was simply a pirate flag.

To say that panic ensued was an understatement.  We lived out in the country and serious medical help was about forty minutes down the highway.  My wife immediately contacted the poison control center.  Fortunately this all happened before the days of voice mail, otherwise she might still be on hold, even though my son is now twenty five.  They gave her some sort of advice and I can’t for the life of me remember whether they said to induce or not to induce vomiting.  I think it was the latter.  Inducing vomiting with my eldest has never been a problem.  Serving fried liver one night for dinner did it quite nicely and probably still would.  At any rate, the crisis was averted by the simple expedient of either inducing or not inducing vomiting.  And life went on.

Another joy of country living was the abundance of insects.  We were visited by all of them – June bugs, hummingbird moths, ladybugs, enormous spiders (I think they killed mice), wood ticks and large, very hungry black ants.  My son thought the ants were cute and looked appetizing.  That’s right, the same son who drank the paint thinner.  It would have been so much easier for everyone if he had just poured the paint thinner on the ants and gone and tormented the neighbor’s dog or something.  He did not.  A few days after drinking the paint thinner he thought he’d eat an ant.  It was a race to see who would eat who first.  My son won but not before the ant got his licks, or perhaps I should say “bites” in.  I managed to do absolutely nothing except watch, fascinated.  Normally I would have called my wife but she was busy removing a wood tick from my other son’s ear.  So, my son cried and wasn’t the least bit consoled by my pointing out that eating ants was not wise.

It seems no matter what you do, your children of tender years will try to find a way of injuring themselves.  That’s not the worst of it.  They’ll do it in such a way, and I’m sure it isn’t intentional, that YOU’LL end up feeling guilty.  You shouldn’t have left Grandfather’s World War One bayonet lying around, or you should have put Uncle Bill’s Korean War flame thrower out of reach.  Or, or, or . . .

We always considered ourselves responsible parents.  We tried not to have toxic chemicals (other than the ones you can drink or smoke) in the house.  And if we did buy the occasional heavy duty cleaner or can of drain-clog remover or bottle of dandelion killer, it was kept out of reach of tiny hands.  But given all these safety precautions, my youngest once tried to kill himself with his brother’s microscope set.  You’re probably wondering how he did that and you may even be wondering if there are any old microscope sets lying around your house.  Well, he didn’t stick the barrel down his throat, he didn’t cut himself on the slides (they were child-proof plastic).  No, inventive little darling that he was, he simply took the tweezers out of the box and stuck them right into the nearest wall socket.  First, though, he removed the plastic child-proof plug.  To this day, it’s something everyone likes to recall for him in case he forgets, despite the fact that he once tried to pass a pepperoni stick through his nose . . . from the inside out.  Nope the old “tweezers in the 110 Volt wall socket” trick remains a classic to this very day.