Lessons I'm Going
To Teach My Kids
Too Late #9
The young girl is at Sunday brunch with her family in the booth next to ours in the modest family-oriented eatery. She’s had her pancakes and she drew on her placemat with crayons, her little collection of toy cars carefully arranged on the windowsill beside her. And now she wants to play the claw machine.
Three weak-springed hooks hang over a motley collection of ratty stuffed toys. At a dollar a play, the machine probably makes money even if you win. The trick is not to try for the toy you want, but the toy on top. Combine a very short time limit on the claw with a young girl’s lack of hand-eye coordination and she’s quickly lost the three dollars her family was willing to give up.
Back at the table, she pleads for more money. Her mother looks through her purse, not too thoroughly.
“Oh, that was all the change I had.”
The girl persists, she begins to whine, so the father steps in.
“It’s a scam.”
The girl doesn’t understand.
“It’s a scam,” the father repeats, more emphatically.
“I don’t think she knows what the word ‘scam’ means,” the mother suggests.
“It means you’ll never win. You can keep putting money in it forever and ever and you’ll never get anything out of it. You can never win. It’s a rip-off, a scam.”
The girl’s face is frozen, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes actually losing sparkle. She’s looking straight ahead at neither her father nor her mother, but at something far off in the distance, past them, past the horizon. Her little brain ticks over, absorbing this new, unwanted, and unwarranted information. You can almost see her dreams shattering, her awe and wonder at the world collapsing like a ratty stuffed toy falling from a weak-springed hook’s tentative grasp.
Done with breakfast, they pay their bill and tip poorly, recouping their loss.
“Don’t forget your cars.”
“Do you want the drawing you made?”
No, she doesn’t need it, not where she’s going. Home to get the “you die, you turn to dust” speech.
I want to stop her on her way out. I want to grab her little arm and shake her and tell her that you can win on that machine. That I’ve seen it with my own eyes, that it is possible. That anything is possible. But I don’t.
We need her. We need people like her, people like she’s going to be, to offset my kids. Someone’s got to balance out the dreamers, the optimists, the ones who don’t get the soul-crushing speech, the ones who don’t know there are limits on anything, the ones who don’t even realize that they could ever fail.
And when they do, I’ll go down into the basement, and haul out an old, dust-covered box full of ratty stuffed toys and I’ll wave them in their faces.
“Should have put the money into a savings plan, you dummies.”
And they’ll make an appointment with the girl and go to her office and have a long talk with her about what their options are and how to ensure their financial security and what investment plan is best for them and so on, and so on, and so on, until their eyes look just like hers.
Lesson #9 —
Put Some Money Aside
For A Rainy Day
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