My Moral Obligation

School has started, and summer has finally started to roll to an end. For that I am grateful for one reason... You can't drive anywhere in the summer without seeing a kool-aid stand or candy stand that some little kids set up to make a few extra bucks. Heck, it doesn't have to be food. The neighborkids set up stands every year trying to sell anything they can get their hands on. Rocks, their brother or sister's toys, sugar cubes. This makes me laugh every time I drive by, but that's just the thing. I can't just drive by. I have a moral obligation to stop at any stand I see. It was not that long ago that I was a kid myself sitting behind that table, up to my elbows in sticky kool-aid and snow cone syrup. My best friend Cozette and I started out young, but each summer we branched out with our new "business" ideas. Kool-aid turned into snowcones, which we sold along with licorice, tootsie rolls, laffy taffy, and pretty much anything else you could think of. We sat there under our umbrella, just waiting for our usual customers. I remember counting the cash we made at the end of a long, hot, summer day... $75 later we were on top of the world. (It helps that we had Cozette's cute 'lil downsyndrome sister sitting out next to us... definately brings in the business.) The greatest day in a kid's life... which is what brings me to my moral obligation.

I was driving to my grandma's house one after this past summer. There was a little fold up table on the side of the road, sitting behind it a brother and sister. No juice, no cookies, no toys. Just paper. They had bee folding away, making a collection of paper airplanes to sell for 10 cents each. They were thrilled when I got out of my car and started walking towards them. They showed me all the different airplanes they had made. Their mom walked towards me, shaking her head apologetically, but I smiled and told her it was OK. I took the coolest-paper airplane-ever, leaving a few bucks in change that I scrambled out of my coin compartment in my car. They were thrilled. I walked away, shaking my head as I held the paper airplane between my fingers, remembering the greatest day of my childhood...