7.JULY. 00

In honor of my youngest son's 29th birthday, I am posting this bit of flash fiction I wrote a while back. It's loosely based on an incident in his life...Happy Birthday, Al!

From Classics to Pop

Wandering along the lakefront path, the kid pulled the old lady grocery cart partially filled with books, college texts, high school algebra, an anthology of great literature, titles by Camus, Sartre, Kafka...

BOOKS FOR SALE, read the scrawled sign on the cart.

Broke, he had hit upon the idea of dumping all of his books into the  shopping cart and hitting the Chicago streets to sell them...a novel idea, he had thought wryly. Surprisingly, people actually had been buying them....a quarter here, and fifty cents there. This tall lanky kid with shoulder length hair, smiling, friendly faced, hawking literature from a grocery cart no doubt had a certain appeal.

Tired, he took a seat on a park bench next to a homeless man, musing about the possibilities of making this into a temporary career. 

"With the right marketing and a constant supply of books....of course, they'd have to be free....and I'd have to have good weather...and better shoes," he thought. 

His feet, clad in his holey hi-top sneakers were killing him.

Letting the idea go, he absent mindedly looked out over the lake. The bumÐs plea slowly entered his awareness.

"Got some spare change, buddy, a couple of bucks maybe for a meal. I ain't eaten in a while."

Well acquainted with hunger himself, the kid answered. 

"No, man, I can't spare any cash. Food for thought is about all I can offer you at the moment."

 "How about a book?"

Reaching into his cart and retrieving  Candide, he handed it to the bum. Kafka would have been a bit much...hope was required here, after all.

Looking at him strangely, the bum took the book and moved off, muttering to himself.

"Ten-fifty in total sales", the kid thought to himself.

95°. Humid as hell. Sweating.

'Ten-fifty is not going to go far and I need something to drink."

He looked idly at the other wilted people passing by. The idea hit him in a flash.

Stuffing the cash in his back pocket, pulling the cart with the remaining books, he headed into the city to a grocery store. He had enough cash for two cases of cold pop, on sale, and a bag of ice. On a day like today a cold drink was more of a commodity than a book. He did the numbers. "At seventy-five cents a can, I can parlay my ten bucks into, maybe, thirty-six dollars." 

Trashing most of the remaining great ideas of the western world, he loaded the iced pop into the cart on top of the few remaining books which served as a retaining wall. He moved out into the street and headed back to the lakefront, selling the pop along the way, and patting himself on the back for his ingenuity.

For ingenuity was exactly what it took to survive on the street.