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I read Calvin and Hobbes as a child. I liked it a lot, and it definitely remains a strong influence on my thought processes, values and personality.
It also gave me the idea to set up a lemonade stand. But it went a bit differently for me than Calvin.
Growing up in Sacramento, I cultivated a collection of citrus trees. We had oranges, kumquats, grapefruit, etrogs, pink lemons, and something called a Buddha's Hand. Of course we also had several good old fashioned Meyer lemon trees that produced far more fruit than we could use. We would make curd, but there was still a lot left over.
So, when I was six years old, I decided to set up a lemonade stand.
I intended to charge a dollar a glass. My mom said it was a bad idea, nothing good would come of it, it wouldn't sell, I'd get kidnapped from our quiet suburban neighborhood, etc. I ignored her and went about making the lemonade. I dragged my Fisher Price work table down to the curb.
I earned about a hundred dollars from stupid guys showing off for their bitches and giving me big bills for a glass, just to show that they could.
"Oh, so you made some money, Ethan."
At the end of the day, I cleaned up the things.
Some angry children torture small animals for fun. What I did was different.
A while back I had dragged my Fisher Price picnic table around to the side of the house, a narrow passage about four feet wide between fence and house, lined with plants and leftover rocks and pebbles. I had propagated some mint plants there. I bought some cactus at the store, and played around with increasing their numbers through clonal propagation, and grafting them with toothpicks, turning few into many and augmenting them with parts from other cacti. I found the feeling of cultivation and control somehow gratifying.
I also bought a huge quantity of iris rhizomes from RORIS, an iris plantation in the Sacramento countryside. (I'm told it has been turned into a housing development. This makes me very sad.) Those, too, I propagated and increased through budding. Through elementary school, I sold the clones for $5, then $10, each, making a significant profit.
I haven't seen the house where I grew up in almost a decade. Irises are hardy and well-acclimated to the arid climate, dense clay, and low water table of Sacramento. I'd assume the iris mounds are still where I left them, unattended, probably vast in number by now.
The family would now and then go visit Cal Expo for the State Fair. We could actually bike there; our house was at the 13th mile on the local trail; the exit for Cal Expo was at the 5th mile. The bike trail ran along an actual wilderness area. We would see rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, mountain lions, egrets, deer, geese, ducks, even golden eagles. That much, at least, Calvin and I had in common in our upbringing.
At Cal Expo, in 1996 I believe, General Motors showed off the EV-1, the prototype electric car. Everyone was very impressed, including me. They gave us glossy pamphlets and goodie bags. General Motors didn't like the exuberant reception and onslaught of frantic phone calls asking where they could buy one, so they killed the program. Ten years later they came to the government begging for handouts.
In the other direction lay the Nimbus fish hatchery, at the 20th mile mark. A highly functional but sadly overlooked facility, made of cinder blocks and huge slabs of concrete back during the Great Depression, there were enormous troughs of rainbow salmon spawn, lined with five-cent candy dispensers that distributed fish pellets. Throw the pellets to the fish, they would go into a frenzy. I never enjoyed fishing - did not see the point - but I did enjoy throwing food to the creatures and watching them jump for the pellets I threw.
Very few people visited the hatchery; the premises were usually deserted. I found this strange because the appeal, to me, seemed much greater than Chuck-E-Cheese, which I hated. I thought it was very strange and sad that the government wasn't in the business of building such nice facilities anymore, especially since everyone else seemed to enjoy catching the rainbow salmon.
I didn't realize it at the time, but this kind of extreme divergence in social preferences and unhesitating willingness to do what pleased me irrespective of what most people happened to like would develop into a defining quality in my personality.
Occasionally my family would go see the Fourth of July parades. It was, after all, the day before my birthday.
I don't want to ever return home to the town where I grew up by any means but a chariot.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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