Business Fair

Recent­ly, we had an air tem­per­a­ture of +51 °C, and the Cen­tral Phoenix air­port was closed. But Phoenix is a met­ro­pol­i­tan area with a pop­u­la­tion of more than four mil­lion peo­ple. The city of Phoenix is the cen­ter of this metrop­o­lis with a pop­u­la­tion of about 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple. Many sub­c­i­ties adjoin it, which do not have clear­ly defined bor­ders, and even streets and roads have con­tin­u­ous num­ber­ing and names. These are cities such as Scotts­dale, where we now live, Cave Creek, where we used to live, Mesa, Gilbert, Glen­dale, Tempe, Chan­dler, Peo­ria and oth­ers. Tak­ing into account the fact that there are almost no high-rise res­i­den­tial build­ings, and high-rise build­ings are found only in the cen­tral part of cities, the length of this metrop­o­lis is very large. It is clear that the air tem­per­a­ture can vary by 1 – 2 degrees, and when it rains in one of the sub­c­i­ties, the sun can shine in another.

Well, now, I want to talk about one fea­ture of the Amer­i­cans. Since child­hood, they try to instill in their chil­dren a spir­it of entre­pre­neur­ship and a com­mer­cial streak. So, a busi­ness fair for chil­dren was orga­nized in the down­town of Phoenix when a school year was still on and there was no such heat on the streets. Such a fair is held annu­al­ly and chil­dren of dif­fer­ent ages sell their hand­i­crafts there. The child has to inde­pen­dent­ly par­tic­i­pate in the process of man­u­fac­tur­ing these prod­ucts from start to fin­ish as a pre­req­ui­site to get in there. We were won­der­ing what these lit­tle busi­ness­men could sell.

We arrived at the mid­dle of the event. Tents with tables were set up in a small park, where chil­dren and their par­ents were sell­ing their prod­ucts. There were cook­ies, cakes, some drinks. But besides edi­ble things, they sold beads, woven baubles, rings, frames and stands for pho­tos, crafts made from shells, paint­ings and pic­ture frames, shelves, t‑shirts with a pat­tern and much more sun­dries. We walked, looked, bought a jar of hon­ey and hon­ey­combs to sup­port start-up entre­pre­neurs. Grand­son bought him­self a Har­ry Pot­ter wand and was con­cerned about what he could trade. I offered him to make crafts from huge amount of Lego parts, which he has a whole box, and sell them. He is very good at build­ing space­ships, invent­ing them from his head. But he said it did­n’t suit him because he did­n’t want to get rid of his Legos.

How­ev­er, the idea of​mak­ing mon­ey did not leave him. He agreed with his moth­er that he will remove all the seed pods from the front-yard tree for $20. An indis­pens­able con­di­tion was that I would help him (of course, for free). We were walk­ing one day and I said: “Oh, the pods start­ed to fall.” And he said,“and my mon­ey!” I look at all this and think, is it good or bad? With my Sovi­et rem­nants of the past, I can’t get used to this approach and always crit­i­cize. Even my daugh­ter is a lit­tle offend­ed by me for this, that I nev­er sup­port­ed her in any com­mer­cial endeav­ors. I always put for­ward a bunch of coun­ter­ar­gu­ments why this or that busi­ness should not be done. So I sup­pressed the entre­pre­neur in my child.

The spir­it of entre­pre­neur­ship is brought up here even at school. For exam­ple, my sis­ter told me that her chil­dren in his­to­ry class were asked to describe an ancient cas­tle from the posi­tion of a real­tor to sell this cas­tle.