For Christmas, my mother- and stepfather-in-law gave my daughter a real — screws and paint and lumber — lemonade stand, except because we had to travel with it, my stepfather didn’t take it out of its packaging, leaving its construction to me…the lazy ass father.
When we got home, I did as any lazy ass father would do: I put the stand’s materials in storage and came up with a way to rationalize my laziness. She won’t need it until the summer, I thought, so there’s no rush to put it together. Plus, even if I did put it together, the thing would be way too big; so if it’s just gonna sit around the house all winter, why not leave it as it is, in its most compacted state?
It made sense to me, and whatever I told my daughter made sense to her, so there it stayed, leaning against a wood-panelled wall on my back porch, unrequested, undesired by all.
Flash forward four-and-a-half months, a few days after winter departs, having long overstayed her welcome. I walk out my kitchen door and onto my back porch, and I think to myself, this place really needs to be cleaned. The recycling in the corner overlows its beige and plastic containers. Clumps of mold dot the windowsills, the ghostly reminders of tiny pumpkins my wife and I once left to rot. A stain flows outward from bottom of my black dormroom-fridge, a lesson in the relative strength of ice and glass, as well as a lesson in volumetric pressure (i.e., the champagne I had storing in the fridge froze during the winter, exploding through its glass bottle, and during one of the frosts, the frozen champagne turned back into a proper liquid, only to leak out of the fridge and flow outward over my plywood floor). Reusable grocery bags, boxes of summer toys, and a small variety of camping gear occupy the rest of the back porch.
And then there’s this: the lemonade stand.
All winter long, I’d looked upon this thing as my nemesis, eyeing it the way one child eyes another after agreeing to settle their differences later, with fisticuffs.
But now the spring has come, and school is gonna let out soon.
—
My daughter and I went food shopping today, which meant I had to reach over the lemonade stand to retrieve our reusable grocery bags. My daughter was standing behind me.
“Hey,” I said. “When are we going to put this thing together?”
“Yeah!” she said (she’s still working on the whole time thing).
“How about Sunday?” I offered. “You and I can put it together and mom can read, or take a nap, or something.”
“Yeah!” she said again.
I grabbed the grocery bags, and we walked out to get in the car. Shit, I thought. Now I’m gonna have to make some space in the garage.
—
I offered my hand to help her down from the car. “What else could we do with the lemonade stand?”
She ignored my hand and leapt out on her own. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”
I closed the door behind her and we headed across the parking lot, her hand in mine. “A puppet show?”
“Yeah!”
“Or,” I continued, “I was also thinking like, ‘The News,’ you know, like when you do ‘The Weather’ at Nana and PopPop’s?”
My parents have a pass-through window between their dining room and living room, and my daughter likes to pull a chair up to it and pretend like she’s on TV while the rest of us are in the audience, and she does these little weather reports, but only if her mom will join her, because she can get super embarassed on her own.
Maybe she’d enjoy using the lemonade stand for something like that, playing TV with her friends or something.
“Yeah!” she said. “And what about, just like, a seller?”
“A cellar?” I asked.
“Yeah, like I’d sell my toys out of it…and like…other stuff.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like a storefront.”
“Yeah.”
Shit, I thought. I’m raising a capitalist.
—
She sat in the chair of the grocery cart, delicately picking at the doughy parts of a free chocolate-chip cookie that the store’s baker was nice enough to give her. She doesn’t just bite into the thing; she picks at it, as if the pleasure of food (for her) is communicated not just through her taste buds but also her fingertips.
We were in the last aisle of the grocery store, needing only to retrieve her frozen breakfast foodstuffs and my frozen ice-cream snack (a truly guilty pleasure at this point, my belly already being way too big to indulge), and I started thinking about an article I read a year or so ago about a nine-year-old girl whose father was a journalist and who had followed in his footsteps to begin a neighborhood paper of her own, only to have, several issues in, a bona fide murder occur in her neighborhood, and being an intrepid reporter, she didn’t hesitate to track the story down, her truly young age not withstanding.
That memory led to a fantasy where my daughter used her lemonade stand as a TV frame while she reported her takes on the day’s news. The show would start out as opinion, but as she got older and took more of an interest in the world around her, she’d begin to make connections that others had not yet made, and her take on the news would become a valuable commodity, not in terms of its monetary return but in terms of its social importance. Having by this point graduated from performing exclusively for an in-person audience to broadcasting to millions of viewers on YouTube, she would stand outside on our back lawn, her lemonade stand still in front of her, and offer the world the informed and compassionate perspective of a politically impassioned six- or seven-year-old white, American girl.
“Dada,” she said, “Can we get the cinnemon french-toast sticks?”
“No,” I answered, reaching for the homestyle waffles. “You never eat them.”
__
I realized later that my nemesis had really been my lack of imagination. The package of screws and paint and lumber that my mother- and stepfather-in-law gave to their granddaughter was not a lemonade stand. It was an opportunity. It didn’t require warm temperatures or clear blue skies or potential patrons patrolling the sidewalks of my village. All it required was a young child’s attention.
Puppet shows work fine in the winter, and weather reports bask in the excitement of winter’s storms and snows.
Sure, the stand would have occupied a lot of space in her playroom, totally throwing off whatever interior design may exist there, but who gives a rat’s ass about interior design in the winter, when visitors are few and inhabitants prefer being under their blankets?
Seriously: what a great idea this thing was, what an incredible Christmas gift! To give a five-year-old child in the dead of winter a dynamic opportunity to activate her imagination without requiring the use of a screen, a battery, or even a bit of electricity, a naturally constructed set that cries out for a child to fill it with her creativity and drama!
What a fool I was to have missed it. What a lazy ass fool.
Luckily, hope springs eternal, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes.
Her career as a newscaster may start on Sunday.
Or maybe she’ll just want to sell you her old toys.
Tell her Dada sent ya.
