The set list for the benefit concert at Piper Nakagawa's lemonade stand, which was rained out at 3:11 in the afternoon and never rescheduled. Piper did the year's accounts on the back of it, because it was the paper she had. Both sides are printed here. Click a song to turn the page over.
A word from the corner
I have held this crossing twenty-two years. My name is Ray Pletcher and my job is small and I will describe it honestly: I stand in the road so that the road stops being the road for eleven seconds. That is all a crossing is. A borrowed interval.
Piper's table sat forty feet from my post, on the grass strip, where I could see it the whole time without turning my head. In June she asked if a person is allowed to have a concert on a sidewalk. I said a person is allowed to have almost anything on a sidewalk if they do not block it and if they come inside when there is thunder. She wrote both of those rules on the poster. She is a better listener than most adults I have stopped traffic for.
The concert was called for 3:15. The sky opened at 3:11 and did not close until 4:40. Eleven cousins and a neighbor with a folding chair stood under the Vitelli awning and watched it come down and nobody was even that sad, which I have thought about since. Something can be cancelled and still be the thing you remember about a summer. I do not know what to call that. I only know that at 4:40 the gutters were running clean and the whole street smelled like warm asphalt and lemons, and a person who had not sold one single cup that day was laughing so hard she had to sit on the curb.
The set list (front)
In pencil, in a sandwich bag, taped to the near table leg. Recovered dry.
Back of the page: LEMONS · 21 count · Vitelli's on Wick · $6.30. Mr. V. put three extra in the bag and would not take money for them, so really 24. He said the extra ones were for the concert. There was no concert. There were still 24 lemons.
−$6.30
Back of the page: SUGAR · 4 lb, taken from the cabinet at home · $2.19, borrowed. Repaid in dishes, six nights, no complaining. Her mother has noted in the margin that a little complaining is allowed and was not counted against her.
−$2.19
Back of the page: CUPS · one sleeve of 100 · $2.89. Sixty-two used. Thirty-eight remain, in a bread bag in the hall closet, and Piper has written next to them: THESE STILL COUNT. They do. An unspent thing is not a lost thing. It is a thing standing at the curb.
−$2.89
Back of the page: GIVEAWAYS · one cup poured into a pie tin, no charge, for the brown dog from Wick Street who arrives at 2 and leaves at 2:20. Four free cups to the Hoyt kids for holding the sign in the sun. Recorded as costing nothing. I would argue this is the only line on the page that is definitely accurate.
$0.00
Back of the page: ICE · three bags out of the Hoyts' chest freezer in the garage · no charge · settled with lemonade and one drawing of their car. My part in the show was to blow the whistle twice at the end of the slow song. I practiced. I want that in the record.
$0.00
Back of the page: SALES · 62 cups at 25¢ = $15.50, gathered across eleven afternoons between June 21 and August 30. Best day: July 3rd, humid, roofers on the Delvecchio house, nineteen cups before four o'clock.
+$15.50
Back of the page: TIPS · $4.75, including one Canadian quarter and one brass button off somebody's coat. The button is still in the cash box. She will not spend it and she will not throw it out, and that is the whole of what I understand about value.
+$4.75
Back of the page: DISCREPANCY · 50¢ missing on the August 30 count, carried as a question all autumn. Found October 4th behind the near table leg, fuzzy, in the grass. Books balanced. She walked it down to my post to show me before she showed anybody at home.
$0.00 (net)
Back of the page: THE COOLER · Deitch Hardware, the green one with wheels that roll both ways · $12.99. Held on account. We have $8.87. Short $4.12, carried forward to next June. A carried balance is not a failure. It is a promise you made to a season that has not shown up yet.
$0.00
TURNED OVER: 0 of 9 · RUNNING BOOKS: $0.00
Photograph, mislaid
▨
[ alt: A card table on a sidewalk corner, painted pastel yellow, thick black hand-lettering: LEMONADE 25 CENTS, and taped underneath a smaller sign reading CONCERT 3:15 PLEASE STAND ON THE GRASS. One folding chair, one cooler with a single good wheel, a coffee can of pencils. The rain has not started yet, but the shadow under the table has already gone soft at the edges, and every leaf on the maple is turned pale side up. ]
The picture itself is in a drawer in a house I do not live in. The description is what I have and I have found it holds up.
Notes to next season, in her hand
> START AT 11 NOT 2. PEOPLE ARE THIRSTY BEFORE THEY KNOW IT.
> ASK MR. PLETCHER WHICH SIDE THE SUN IS ON AT 3.
> DO THE CONCERT IN THE MORNING. MORNINGS DO NOT THUNDER.
That last one is not true. Mornings thunder. I have stood in it. But I have decided not to correct it, because a person is allowed one working belief per summer, and because for all I know she will schedule it at ten in the morning on a Tuesday in June and the sky will hold, and then she will have been right and I will have been a man who knew a fact.
Here is the only thing I would put in a report of my own. Every morning I stand in the road and I hold up my hand and the whole street agrees, for eleven seconds, to be about something other than getting somewhere. Then it goes back to being the road. Nothing is built. Nothing is kept. And I have never once thought it was wasted.
The cooler will get bought. The concert will or will not get played. Either way the table goes up again on the grass strip in June and I will be at my post at 7:40 with my sign, and somebody will pay a quarter for something a child made badly and carefully in her own kitchen.
So: the light is green, it's clear both ways, and there's nobody coming — what exactly are you waiting for?
Kept by R. Pletcher, crossing guard, Fennel & Wick, post 4. Sums checked twice by hand and once by Marcus, who is nine and fast. Brass button: not for sale. Canadian quarter: spent, regrettably, on gum.
one (1) cup, brown dog, 2:04 p.m., no charge, no receipt, no regrets