So my second child and oldest daughter wanted me to edit her college entrance essay. (Man do I feel old.) She chose a story from her childhood I had forgotten about but was nevertheless amused by. I will do my best to paraphrase it. When my daughter was about 6 years old she announced that she wanted to go to college and study to be an artist. (I am absent from this story, by the way. I must have been working.) My wife told her that college was very hard to go to. You needed to have excellent grades and save a lot of money. Being the capitalist she was, my daughter decided to start saving then. The one thing she valued above everything else was her prize rock collection. She set up a folding table in front of our house with a sign that said, “Rocks, .25 each” People walking their dogs just looked at her with puzzlement while children going by openly laughed at her. Not one stone sold. She was very discouraged as evening fell and she started to take down her sign. There was a sweet senior lady with four cats who would pay my son to look in on them from time to time when she went out of town. She lived just across the street and came walking up to my daughter who was near tears. “What’s the matter, honey?” our neighbor asked. “I’m trying to earn money to save for college by selling the most important things I have; my rock collection. But no one is interested.” “Well you know,” said the neighbor, “I have a bare patch in the walkway to my house and a rock garden sounds like a great way to fill it. How about letting me but all your rocks?” My daughter couldn’t believe it but agreed. The nice lady reached in her purse and pulled out a handful of money which she gave to my daughter. Then they took the stones and set up the garden. My daughter tried to make them as beautiful as possible and then gave the lady a hug. Then she skipped back to our house and put her table away. When she came in the house, my wife asked what she was doing outside. My daughter said she was selling rocks for her college fund. My wife panicked as she thought the neighbors would now think we couldn’t afford food and had to have our daughter sell rocks to make money. (It sounds pretty farfetched when you hear it now but at the time it seemed like a real scenario.) She asked my daughter if she sold any rocks to which came the proud reply, “I sold them all.” Then she held up the money. My wife counted it and the cat lady had given my daughter $100 for her stones. Now, all these years later that money is still in her college fund. As I finished reading the essay I asked my daughter which school it was for. She said it was for Stoney Brook University on Long Island. I just laughed and said, “How could they not accept the girl who sold stones to get into Stoney Brook?
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