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My daughter, not yet eight, has grown suddenly careful with her money. She’s not greedy. (She often forgets to ask for her allowance.) But, now that she’s figured out that money is finite, she spends what she has with great deliberation.
Prior to our recent beach vacation, she planned a lemonade venture for weeks in her mind, fantasizing about the preparation of the drinks, the inevitable line of customers, the transactions. Our family has a running conversational riff about one day opening a store selling only her favorite foods: salmon sashimi, cucumber, chocolate, a few others equally eclectic. She’s sophisticated enough to know it’s a joke. So when she contemplated the lemonade stand she settled on two items she thought would have a better shot than sashimi: lemonade and chocolate brownies.
My wife donated the brownie mix. My daughter and her cousins worked on the sign for two days, including graphic representations of their offerings. They stirred the lemonade from a mix, planning to add lemon slices for authenticity, but in their excitement they forgot that last touch.
They set up their stand in the shade of a tree on a corner in Bald Head Island, North Carolina, where cars are banned and people run errands with golf carts. My wife and I went off with the six-seater to pick up house guests, leaving my daughter and her two cousins in the hands of my sister and brother-in-law, who monitored from lawn chairs.
I feared that the first lesson of commerce would be how hard it is to pull in customers, but I suppose I overlooked the cuteness factor of two eager little girls and a well-tanned five-year-old boy with a mop of thick dark hair and a smile that could melt icebergs. Less than an hour later they had sold out, if you don’t count the three brownies they’d set aside for themselves. And who’s scrooge enough to count that?
They declared with pride that they had eighteen dollars — six for each of them with no arguing about the relative contributions of the youngest. But I was determined that there be a business lesson in this. I said they must deduct expenses.
“What are expensives?” my daughter asked with great seriousness.
Aw, heck. I explained the concept of costs, but my heart had gone out of it already. We deducted three bucks and they each ended up with five and we headed for the ocean.
Over the next two days, my daughter proudly left three shops in a row without spending her share of the bounty. Then, on the way home, we stopped in Richmond. A few blocks from the Jefferson Hotel, we passed a plain storefront with agates and geodes in the window. It specialized in beads and rocks, playing down the access-restricted head shop in back. Beads and rocks, as it happens, are the specialties also of every seven-year-old girl in the world. We entered with my daughter in the lead.
The place had only the most basic merchandising, home-made strands of beads and minerals hanging from plain hooks, drawers filled with colorful beads, rocks and small fossils sorted by type on tables and shelves. My daughter was — well, like a kid in a rock shop. She had to have everything, but knew she couldn’t. The clerk behind the counter — eager, friendly, New Agey — must have been disappointed with our admonitions about the budget, but she didn’t show it.
After about twenty minutes of touching everything, creasing the brow, doubling back, touching again, my daughter settled on a shelf of sparkling golden rocks.
“I think I want some gold,” she said.
It fell to me, over her shoulder, to point out like a heel that she was looking at pyrite, fool’s gold. So what? It sparkled, it fell within her budget, and the one she selected filled her palm perfectly.
Scarcely an hour earlier, we’d been dragging her through the hot, humid streets of Richmond, urging her forward, reprimanding when she dropped too far behind. Now, leaving the store with her treasure, the kid had springs in her steps. She knew for sure that she’d chosen wisely, that she’d taken possession of something that in turn had the prospect of possessing her. She declared that she’d start a rock collection and that she’d look up on line, when we got home, about pyrite.
In that moment, she reminded me of an older nephew whom we’d taken to the Bronx Zoo years ago, before we had a child of our own. All he wanted to do was go into every gift shop and buy trinkets, which he’d stuff into his pockets with an owner’s pride. Real live lions and giraffes and elephants — couldn’t take those home. A rubber rhino to control, to have forever, to place on the shelf as a trophy — that’s what a kid’s after.
My daughter, among other interests, pursues fireflies at night with the determination of a big game hunter. She’s evolved from wanting to trap them in a jar, where they surely die, to wishing only to see them glow in her hand for a few seconds. Then she sets them free and seeks another.
The morning after her purchase, I emerged from the shower to find her in a huff. My wife explained the problem: she’d lost the pyrite — had it and then didn’t.
“How do you lose a rock in a hotel room?” Maybe the same way you let a firefly go.
When my wife went into the bathroom I helped my daughter search the covers of each bed, look under and behind every piece of furniture. Gone.
I was halfway through Round Two when she turned to me, reconciled to her loss. “Well, thanks anyway for helping me, Dad.” I paused and swallowed. That unprompted thank-you was real gold.
We ran out of places to look, but she found the rock in her knapsack a few minutes later — had put it there for safe keeping and forgotten.
That afternoon, back home, she asked without prompting to use the computer. Then she came back downstairs, requesting help. She did a Google search and couldn’t find fool’s gold or pyrite. Turns out the first six hits or so for fool’s gold reference a movie. And she was spelling pyrite wrong. I set her up on Wikipedia and she printed the results.
The article states: “Despite being nicknamed fool’s gold, small quantities of gold are sometimes found associated with pyrite.”
So true.
