Actually, I think I got to be pretty good at knowing the value of a dollar. When I turned ten years old, Daddy sent me ten dollars for my birthday. This was a dollar more than he'd given me when I turned nine. So, by Daddy's estimation, the value of a dollar equaled about one year of my life. Maybe that's what detectives in old movies meant when they said, "Life's pretty cheap to some people."

When I got the ten dollars, Mama said, "If you were smart you'd save your birthday money for something you really want. But you'll probably be just like your father, not knowing the value of a dollar, and you'll waste it all on candy. So don't come crying to me when it's all gone, because remember, I told you."

After much deliberation, I decided that the best thing to do would be to take my ten dollars and invest it, or better yet, start a business. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of professional opportunities available to ten-year-olds in that day and age. That was back before "tweens" were invented, and we kids were not highly valued by the business community. So I chose the entrepreneurial classic—a lemonade stand. After all, we did live in Southern California, where people were often hot and thirsty.

So I spent the ten dollars on sugar, lemons, paper cups, and one of those little plastic juicers that Speedy Gonzales could have worn as a sombrero. I borrowed the card table.

The very first day I made eight dollars and used up all my lemons. I was happy about having made eight dollars until I realized that because I'd invested ten dollars in the first place, I'd actually worked all day just to lose two dollars, which at Daddy's exchange rate meant one-fifth of my life down the drain. Plus, I'd have to use the eight dollars that were left over to buy more lemons. So I reinvested my eight dollars, and raised the price of my product. The next day I had fewer customers but I made nine dollars and had some lemonade left over. I didn't think it would keep well so I drank it. After two days of work, I had made seventeen dollars and spent eighteen. I had gone from losing two dollars a day to losing one dollar a day, which was a pretty big raise in salary, and of course there was the fringe benefit of free lemonade. Unfortunately, I needed to buy more sugar and paper cups and of course, more lemons.

I tried all sorts of different angles: pink lemonade, extra strong lemonade, extra sweet lemonade, spicy lemonade. I tried raising the price, lowering the price. But the best I seemed able to do was make about a dollar or two profit on any given day—less if it was cloudy or cool or a Wednesday, on which day, for reasons unknown, people just didn't buy much lemonade. And every time I made a profit there were ever more lemons to buy. Clearly it was going to take a long time to get rich this way.

Then I had a brainstorm. When I finally had twenty dollars in my pocket, I decided to make a valuable investment in my business: I'd just buy my own lemon tree and cut out the lemon middleman. With Dougie's old Radio Flyer in tow, I set off in search of a tree dealer.

I couldn't find a proper nursery within wagon range, but then I remembered the flea market. It was a mysterious operation that appeared in a weedy lot every Sunday morning and transformed back into trash and pigeons by nightfall. Mama had declared the place a heap of claptrap, but to me it was glorious. Granted, at first I'd been crushed to discover that "flea market" was not the same thing as "flea circus," but my disappointment vanished when I realized I was surrounded by grownups who still appreciated such treasures as fancy marbles and Pez dispensers. It gave me hope that not everyone forgot what mattered when they got older.

I knew the flea market would have lemon trees. I mean, someone was offering a collection of glass eyeballs ("near mint!"). Lemon trees didn't seem like much to ask for. And sure enough, I found a tree vendors' booth at the end of a long row which also featured roadkill taxidermy and mismatched hubcaps.

The tree vendors had a sign that said: "A sordid Citrus Tree. 15 dolar each. Frut in just 1 year." Frut in just 1 year, I read aloud in awe. I could have all the lemon supply I needed by next summer!

"Here's fifteen dollars, I'd like a tree," I told the plant sellers. They asked me something in Spanish. I had studied a bit of Spanish at the Sesame Street level, but it was of no use to me here.

I shrugged in English.

They shrugged in Spanish.

So I pointed at the tree I liked the best. Its leaves were the shiniest and darkest of green. It had a slim, perfectly straight trunk, and its foliage had been pruned into a perfect sphere. Basically, it looked like a giant green lollipop. Except that there was also this big root-ball on the bottom, wrapped in a burlap sack. So it looked like a giant green lollipop about to enter a field day sack race.

The tree was so heavy I could barely drag it home in the Radio Flyer. I had no idea how I was going to get it into the ground by myself, since Gladdy was not allowed to play in the dirt, and Dougie couldn't stand dirt—particularly the accompanying ants, pill bugs, worms and such that made dirt so much fun. Luckily, Gabe, an eighth-grader who lived three streets away, was always "just happening" to ride his bike past our house. Gabe was the kind of kid everyone hoped would play their team's "anchor" during tug-of-war. I mean, he probably could have yanked my tree right out of the ground without even digging first, if I was trying to get the tree out of the ground instead of in. Anyway, he just happened to ride by while I was struggling to heave the tree out of the wagon and onto the ground. Gabe wasn't watching where he was going; for some reason he was staring up in the direction of Gladys's window, and he crashed his bike right into our mailbox. So I asked him, since he was down on the ground anyway, how about if I paid him five dollars to help me plant my tree? And he did. It took twice as long as it needed to because he spent the whole time asking me questions about Gladys. He talked kind of like Grape Ape.

After paying him five dollars, I was all out of capital so that was the end of my business for a while. I watered the tree every day and looked forward to the following summer, when I would suddenly strike it rich from my green tree being turned into golden fruit by the alchemy of the California sun.

And next spring, sure enough, there they were: flowers, hundreds of flowers! Flowers that smelled as knock-you-flat sweet as old ladies' perfume.

I used the whole eleven dollars I got for my birthday that year to buy only paper cups and sugar. It was risky but I had faith in my tree. Soon, it was covered with dozens and dozens (maybe even hundreds) of yellowish-green fruits about the size of gumballs. I gave the tree lots of attention and the fruits swelled. They got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until they were as big as tennis balls. Then they were as big as softballs! They were the biggest lemons I had ever seen in my whole entire life!

That's because they were grapefruits.

Well. There was no going back. What could I do, dig up the tree and bring it back to the flea market? So I figured, when life gives you lemons, et cetera.

Even when life doesn't give you lemons.

I squeezed the big juicy grapefruits and opened a grapefruit juice stand. I thought it was actually very good for grapefruit juice, even though I didn't like grapefruit juice. So I wrote "(Really Good!) Grape Fruit Juice" on my sign and charged fifty cents per cup—a premium rate for roadside juice back then. Mama was mortified and asked me what I could possibly be thinking—had I had too much sun? She said word was going to get around that her Baby wasn't right in the head.

The first week I was in business, the local newspaper came by to interview me. They thought it was really funny that I had a grapefruit juice stand, and they laughed a lot as they asked me where I came up with the idea. I explained that there was nothing strange about it, that it was simply very good grapefruit juice from grapefruits I had grown myself and picked that very morning. I gave them each a free cup. They told me that although they did not like grapefruit juice per se, they had to admit that for grapefruit juice it was really quite good, and maybe I was onto something. They took my picture and published it in the "About Town" section of the paper, telling people where they could find me if anyone actually wanted fresh grapefruit juice.

Now, it may be true that not many people like grapefruit juice, but all of those who did, came to me. I had found my niche market. Even people who didn't like grapefruit juice came to see if I'd had too much sun and wasn't right in the head. My mother changed her mind about my business when the paper came out and people started coming around. She got the idea to capitalize on my fame by dressing Gladys up and having her sing and dance for the crowds. People weren't sure which was more amusing: my grapefruit juice stand, or my big sister in her satin dress and rag curls and saddle shoes. We were a two-person Gong Show.

People started putting tips in my jar. Soon we were bringing in a couple hundred dollars a week, of which one-third went to me, one-third to Gladys, and the other one-third to my mom, as a "manager fee." My mother was convinced that Gladys would get discovered by one of the newly quenched onlookers.