I'll give you an example. I took my seven-year-old daughter to a matinee
for her birthday, and as we passed the concessions stand she asked
for an enormous bag of Skittles. My normal reaction would have been to
double over laughing, but because it was her birthday, and because she
had brought $4 of her own money I got her the Skittles.

About half way through the movie I heard the unmistakable sound of 97
Skittles clacking onto the floor beneath her seat. She looked at me in
horror, and even in the dark I could tell she was close to tears. So I
smiled and told her not to worry, got out of my seat, and crouched down
to pick up all the fallen Skittles, rubbing each one on my shirt a bit
before carefully placing it back in her bag.

"Good as new," I said, and took my seat again as she resumed her snacking.
A few minutes passed.

"Dad," she whispered, "they gave me an M&M instead of a Skittle."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "I guess that happens sometimes. It's like a little
prize."

"They gave me some gum too."

"Hey look at Nancy Drew up there."

"Is this a marble?"

"No more talking now honey. Those ushers carry mace."

I realize that some would call me cheap. I think it's more accurate to
say I'm incredibly cheap. Of course if I put half the thought and energy
I devote to not spending money into making more money I wouldn't
have to not spend so much. But I suppose I'm someone who was brought up to
believe that asking for a raise is a little haughty, especially when you
spend your work day making personal calls and plotting to sabotage your
manager's vacation plans. So instead I buy three gallons of loss-leader
milk from Tedeschi's and call it a day.

It's not that I don't like hard work or money itself. I've always had
lots of entrepreneurial drive. The problem is that my business sense never
evolved beyond the second grade level. Remember when you believed that any
odd piece of junk was highly valuable and rare? My daughter fishes rusty
bottle caps out of the dirt and takes them home as if they're ancient
roman coins. I used to think my collection of various-sized cardboard
tubes was my ticket out of the middle class. When that didn't work I
tried lemonade stands, hot dog stands--would you buy a hot dog from
a grubby-looking boy at the end of his driveway? One saint of a truck
driver did. I can only assume he was ravenous from all the amphetamines
and regretted his decision ten or fifteen miles down the road.

I wasn't any brighter in college when I ran my own bike tune-up
business from my dorm room on weekends. For seven or eight hours that
could have been spent studying fluid dynamics I would repack bearings,
adjust breaks and shifters, and thoroughly clean all the surfaces of
one bike, charging $20 for this service. I think I made a better hourly
wage collecting cardboard tubes. Within a month I had people flocking
to me to fix up their bikes, so I assumed I had this phenomenal business
going. It never occurred to me to do the "revenue minus expenses equals
profit" math. Yet on Monday I'd be back programming a computer to find
the highest known prime number. Apparently it's 17, by the way.

I've always been an idiot when it comes to making money, so not spending
it has become a kind of second career for me. Supposedly this is how
old New England families became wealthy, but so far I haven't been as
happy with the results. What I have gained is an appreciation for all the
good things in life that money can't buy, like a kiss from my daughter,
a beautiful sunset, or a perfect skipping stone from Rocky Beach. You
know the wicked smooth, flat kind I mean? I can't help wondering how
much you could get for a bag of those things.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset. He expects to lose his shirt on another
lemonade stand in August, but is optimistic that his '87 Toyota will
fetch a pretty penny once it's given antique status in 2012.