Hey, can you spare $5? Or $10 Or ...
Something was wrong with my son.
As he hopped into my car and buckled up, he didn't start off our drive with the usual discussion of what happened at school today. He didn't ask questions about some of life's mysteries a second grader tends to grapple with. And he didn't hit me with his new favorite question, who would win if God and Superman had a fight?
Something was odd this week.
Had he grown in the past couple of days?
Was he wearing new clothes?
Did he have a new haircut?
Was he sick?
Maybe it was the colorful catalogue and manila envelope marked "Payment" tucked under his arm ...
Good Lord, that was it, I realized. He'd gotten trapped in the gravitational pull of his first fund-raiser.
"I'm selling something, Dad," he said as he dropped the catalogue in the front seat. It hit like a stick of dynamite dropped into a country pond - and I was the fish.
"What's it for?" I asked.
"Scouts."
You always know what product is going to be pitched before you even look at the catalogue.
With Boy Scouts, it's popcorn. With Girl Scouts, it's cookies. With youth sports, it's candy bars. With a random elementary grade level, it's junk you'll never use. And, depending on where you live, it's Preteen PETA's fashionable "Eat flesh and die in your own vomit" bumper stickers, charm bracelets and place mats, or the Junior Militia's "The Second Amendment says Screw You" T-shirts.
"What are you selling?" I asked, knowing the answer was "popcorn."
"Popcorn," he said. "I've already sold three."
I looked at the list. Yep, three. All to relatives. The relatives always get sucked in.
"What's the money going for?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Do you want to sell popcorn?"
"No, but if I'm the top seller, I get a really cool prize."
"What kind of prize?"
"I don't know."
As a kid, I had to sell candles, popcorn, grapefruit and holiday cheese for various organizations and I was always promised a really cool prize if I was the top seller. I was never the top seller so I never got squat for selling anything, and I never knew where the money went. What life lesson did all that selling teach me? That I hated fund-raisers.
And, as an adult, I still hate fund-raisers.
In the past two weeks, my wife and I have shelled out $44 for various fund-raisers. That's $44 that could have gone toward new brakes for my car. What's more important, blowing all your money on living expenses, or buying a bunch of junk? Yeah, who needs brakes when I can have a decorative holiday candle?
On our first stop, The Boy's grandma bought some popcorn.
On our second stop, his aunt, whose daughter had gotten some of that $44 out of my wife, bought some popcorn.
But on our third, and last stop, we ran into a sister-shaped roadblock.
"Sure, I'll buy some," my sister said to The Boy, quickly flipping through the catalogue, then scratching out a $7 check.
"But while you're here," she said to me, dropping on my lap a random elementary grade level catalogue filled with junk I'll never use, "my son's got a fund-raiser, too."
"What's the money going for?" I asked her.
She smiled.
"Does it really matter?"
Yep, it's always the relatives who get sucked in. Maybe I should start my own youth organization. This fund-raising is a pretty good racket.
