The Story Out of Woodstock, Illinois

by Bill Tammeus of the Kansas City Star

"You want some lemonade?" the kid hollered at us from across the street. My old street, actually, West South Street, the street on which I spent much of my boyhood, the street on which, as a kid myself, I sold lemonade at a similarly rickety sidewalk stand.

"You’re our first customer and the first customer gets it free," the boy said. My sister and I looked at each other. The look said: How can you beat free?

So we walked across and bellied up to the bar at the corner of South and Hayward Streets. Two boys sat (well, sat in the up-and-down ways boys sit) on chairs behind a small table just one house down the sidewalk from the house in which my sister and I grew up. She and I were in town for a visit and were taking a look at the home of our childhood.

I held my cup of free lemonade and took a sip (hoping that the kids’ parents had made it). My sister asked them where they lived. They pointed to two houses down Hayward. It was hard to tell which ones they meant. And anyway, the people we once knew who lived in those houses no doubt were, like us, long gone.

"Do you know what?" I asked the boys

"What?"

"When I was about your age, I lived in that house right there
and I used to sell lemonade right out here at the edge of this
same sidewalk."

"You did?" one boy asked. He seemed intrigued. The other kid was more interested in finding their first paying customer.

"Yes I did. And one day some high school kids drove up in a car. One of those big boys in the car got out and came up to me and handed me a dollar, but he didn’t want any lemonade. He just handed me a dollar and left."

I reached into my pockets and pulled out four quarters.

"Here," I said, "Maybe some day you’ll remember this the way I still remember that."

The kid took the money. My sister and I headed up the hill toward our old house. I had waited nearly 50 years to do that and it felt good.

It’s really quite astounding how we remember small acts of unexpected kindness. I have no idea why that school kid back in the 1950s gave me a whole dollar—quite a prize back then. But the experience made me believe what I still believe, which is that sometimes pure, unmerited favor falls on us... I mean to say that the teen-ager who gave me a dollar once at my lemonade stand helped to create in me the capacity to believe in kindness…

Reprinted with permission from Bill Tammeus of the Kansas City Star.
Copyright, The Kansas City Star, 2005, all rights reserved.