Fresh Ripe Mangoes

On Tuesday I steered a course for San Roque. I aimed to stew in a brooding funk in the shadows of La Fiesta mall, a living tribute to folly that is too ripe with metaphor to pass up as the shambles of economic mismanagement take on tangible as well as abstract significance. Hey, if a picture is worth a thousand words, the vision of La Fiesta’s fading hulk is worth a million.

But even a million words can’t be upstaged by this choice phrase: “Fresh Ripe Mangoes For Sale.” Thus said the wording on a handwritten sign, brandished at roadside south of San Roque, where a group of energetic young entrepreneurs was selling some tropical bounty by the bag full.

Ah, what a sight! It took me back to my lemonade stand of childhood in Illinois, where I, too, tended to independent commerce. My peers, by contrast, vegetated in front of television sets, and thereby became the first wave of Americans so homogenized that the term “human resources” had to be coined just to distinguish them from plant life.

But for those who escaped that grim classification, one shock of recognition runs the whole world round. These purveyors of Fresh Ripe Mangoes are kindred spirits, and were a blessed and touching sight indeed. And so we make the acquaintance of 7-year-old Esteanna Rios, Moses Rios, 10, Tania Aia, 10, and Abel Rios, 11. Actually, there were a few other mango mongers in the group, but I managed to note only the names of those captured in the photo I took.

Which is just the nature of the journalistic beast, but when it came to media relations, these kids were no slouches. I’ve interviewed high-powered captains of commerce for the writing side of my career, mostly in the magazine genre, but these kids have taken the prize for the most enjoyable of conversations. Bright, enthusiastic, cheerful, courteous…they’d exhaust my inventory of the noble side of the adjective ledger.

A good thing that is, too, from the inventory side of things, since the hacks, non-economist economists, and econo-crats (that’s a bureaucrat in economist’s clothing) are exhausting my supply of ignoble adjectives. How far into the grave will they drive the CNMI economy before somebody wakes up and says, “This isn’t funny anymore”?

It’s possible that the grave will be so deep by that point that resurrection ain’t in the cards. Which is why I have been making offers to help inject some legitimate advice into the fray, since I love the Commonwealth too much to have to list “forensic economics” on my “to do” list. Indeed, I’ve seen too much of the outside world lately, which put some kind of forensic zap on my soul, and I just want to eat my Fresh Ripe Mangoes, sell my own conceptual bags of Fresh Ripe Economic Wisdom, and listen to everyone remark on how much weight I’ve gained.

Which brings me to my ringing endorsement of the wares of our mango mongers. If the credibility of a food endorsement is proportional to the girth of the endorser, then I’m the go-to guy for this. Well, truly yummy, I say, and I think we should all have a bag of these Fresh Ripe Mangoes.

But we don’t. In fact, I was the only customer in immediate evidence, which is to say that the mango stand was on rough par with Garapan…and slightly ahead of La Fiesta.

If you want a meaningful call to action to help out the community, then here it is: Invest five bucks in a bag of Fresh Ripe Mangoes. Reward such kids as these, who, by dint of luck or design, have escaped the grasp of TV, at least on last Tuesday afternoon. Come to think of it, maybe they can’t even afford a television.

Well, either way, they are rich in promise, and they have displayed far more competence and business savvy than certain adults who I can name.

So let’s hand the keys to the La Fiesta mall to Esteanna, Moses, Tania, and Abel. It’s just up the road from them anyway. Sure, it’s possible that they can’t do any better with La Fiesta… but could they do any worse?