As a child I always thought of myself as a great entrepreneur – the world was my oyster (ugh) and there was money to be made! All I had to do was come up with the perfect business model. For a time I tried selling homemade potpourri that I made from my mom’s flowers that I baked on a cookie sheet with cinnamon. Needless to say, it was a bust.

Then it was hocking homemade stationary to my dad’s patients at his office. I drew a grid on a fresh sheet of lined notebook paper and colored samples of my work in each square, so my future customers could easily choose their stationary of choice: Yes, I will have 16 sheets of #3 with the red polka dots and 5 of #147 with the psychedelic scribbles. Please and thank you. I had my plan mapped out and would be a bajillionare by the time I turned 8. I neatly placed my sample pages and marketing materials in my “Ski hard or go home” Trapper-Keeper binder that I borrowed from my cool older brother and sent it off with my dad to his office. I was confident that he only had to set it out at the reception desk and my customers would flock like bees to a dripping honeycomb.

Shockingly, that was not the case. In fact, I believe my parents were the only ones to purchase any pages. Deflated I moved on to a car wash, a bake sale and finally the classic lemonade stand. But even that did not happen as planned considering people kept ordering iced tea. Flustered, I would emphasize the fact that this was a LEMONADE STAND YOU IDIOTS. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that a polite patron quietly pointed out that the plastic pitcher I was serving my lemonade from had an old strip of masking on the side labeled “iced tea” that you could see from the road – it was obviously left over from the last church potluck. Thanks, Mom! Gosh! But by the end of that sweaty summer afternoon I collected about $10. Not bad, however I remember questioning the return on my effort…

These young memories of adventures in money came rushing back a couple of weeks ago when I was running out of my apartment building to work. I rounded the corner and was checking email on my phone when I noticed a young boy standing outside of a building on my street. He was well dressed in his buttoned up polo shirt and dockers. His glasses were slightly askew as his high pitched voice called out to the passersby – Grass for sale! Come and get your fresh picked grass! 25 cents a clump! Well, curiosity got the best of me and I simply had to stop to see if my eyes were tricking me. Nope! He was selling neatly tied bundles of grass on a busy New York City street, in lieu of lemonade. But hey, what a deal! 25 cents for a clump of green grass freshly plucked from the mall in Central Park. And I didn’t even have to walk the four blocks to get it myself.

I was completely dumbstruck with how different our childhoods are/were, his and mine. I grew up in a town where having  a large yard and woods to play in was commonplace. Conversely, he is sitting on a goldmine of opportunity in the selling of grass in the midst of an enormous city made almost entirely of concrete. Genius! Maybe I should join his enterprise! Oh, to be a child again… but then I watched another young boy try to catch a rat the size of Miss Bianca at the park to play with last night and I decided maybe I’ll stick with my memories from the Midwest. Just saying.

Writer’s Workshop: Pay attention to a stranger you meet this week or observe and write about them.

One of the first observations I made upon moving with my boy and Miss Bianx to the big city of New York was the STRANGERS! EVERYWHERE! Now you would think that moving from one largely populated area of the country (Southern California) to another (Manhattan), this would not feel like much of a culture shock. But in reality, it was a jolt of tsunami sized proportions. In a matter of days we went from the land of frozen yogurt and palm trees to one of the world’s most diverse melting pots of humanity. And seeing as I loathe using ridiculous phrases like “melting pot” you know it must be serious for me to stoop so low in my normally overly loquacious arsenal of descriptors.

So. Here I am in the big city, feeling like a toothless yokel from the backwoods of Who Knows Where with my eyes opened to all of the colorful people types that roam these busy streets, participating in things like the Dominican Republic Pride On Display parade where 200,000 people wear their country’s flag as capes while they run up and down 6th Avenue with fog horns and whistles. And I am amazed and just how different we all are. Isn’t it fantastic?

And in all of the city that I have explored to date, there is no better place to truly taste these strangers I have as neighbors as on the subway. While commuting to and from work each day, I am able to sit back with my iPod headphones in place playing the background music to my life and I watch (and many times smell) life around me. Have I mentioned lately the way the city tends to smell like hot garbage and urine during the summer months? It is truly an extraordinary experience, I promise.

In any event, this evening was like many others. I jostled my way onto a train car after sweating in the warm abyss of the subway tunnel for a bit. I settled myself against the doors – and yes, I know the signs say not to lean against the doors. I have to break the rules sometimes, just to feel alive. Edgy, I know. As the train rolled into motion I began to watch the people around me, wondering who would catch my attention tonight. And then I saw him. He was a small man, with an extremely lean stature, wearing an over-sized starched white t-shirt and baggy jean shorts riding low above his high top Michael Jordan’s from the late 1990′s. His long, dark hair was tied back in a scrunchy. In his hands, he carried the following: A bag of garbage. A nice bottle of wine. And a gerbil cage, complete with water bottle and running wheel.

For some reason, I found myself stuck on the gerbil cage. Ok, and the scrunchy. And it was all I could do not to follow him home to see what it was all about.