A lot of young people don’t work anymore. They mooch off their parents, go to school, hang out, consume indiscriminately, and criticize, or even attack, everyone else. Small wonder. We’re all born selfish and it’s only having to endure and overcome life’s hard knocks that builds character and makes us empathetic to what others are going through. Not only that, but the very process of having to sell our labor or services in the marketplace educates us in how to cooperate and deal with others. Years ago, every young person had to work on the farm, in the family store, or at some other job in order to make a necessary contribution to the family’s survival. This work built the character of previous generations. What builds character today? TV? Belonging to a gang? The latest fashion craze? Not much.

Eventually most people, as they get older, work in the productive sphere and develop into pretty well-rounded people. But honestly, do you think this is really the same as learning values young? I don’t. I’m sorry to sound like such a pessimistic moralist, but it’s just how I feel.

Back to my story. As I sat with my grandmother and dreamed in the park, I had a vision of my own hot dog stand. It was as exciting to me as having my own yacht. I could see it in my mind’s eye, all polished, gleaming chrome, with the smell of boiling hot dogs, sauerkraut, and onions wafting out in small puffs from beneath the chrome food doors. And I could see myself in a white apron spearing a frank as a six-person line of eager customers looked on approvingly. Reality, I soon found out, was different.

A new chrome hot dog stand, I found, would cost over one thousand dollars. Even a used one would cost much more than the hundred dollars in tips from the butcher shop that I’d saved in my wooden Macanudo cigar box. I therefore decided, with my father’s help, to build my own hot dog stand. Supplies being costly, I tried to use whatever I could find around our garage, to whatever extent possible. I cut down my old crib, nailed paneling all around it to form a three-and-a-half-foot-high square box, and used the wheels from my old carriage to turn it into a rolling box. All that remained was to cut a door in the side for a picnic cooler to hold sodas and supplies. Screw our Coleman camping stove to the top to cook the franks, bore a hole into which I inserted our green picnic table umbrella, and voilà! A hot dog stand! Sort of. All that was needed now was a couple of pots, hot dogs, buns, condiments, sodas, and a vending license. This was graciously supplied by my uncle Freddie, my grandmother’s baby brother, who was a World War II veteran and was thus entitled to a special permit. The morning that he got the license, he’d first gone to the dentist and had all of his teeth pulled. I can still see his toothless grin as he handed over the license and shook my hand. With my old jalopy of a stand, patched together with spit and polish and my father’s ingenuity, I was ready to go into business.

I wish I could see that old hot dog stand one more time. But after the first year I’d saved enough money for a used regular stand and, not realizing that I was dealing with a potential family heirloom, I junked the old stand so there’d be room in the garage for the new one.