Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Preface To Markets: This Little Piggy

There used to be - there still is? - a flea market in Garland where I would buy CDs very cheap & someone said to me when I was walking away from the stall - I had just bought Joy Division's Still for two bucks - the person said to me, "All his shit is stolen, man."

For the longest time - it seemed like years but was probably just a few months months - on Sunday mornings, the wife & I would leash up the dogs & we'd walk to the Farmer's Market in Lexington on Southland Drive.  I hated navigating the hounds through all the people - who wanted to pet them, & from whom they wanted to steal food - so I'd sit across the street, outside this German restaurant, closed Sundays, & call my mother or my sister, & pass the time with talk.  I was thinking we stopped going because my wife got bored of it, but actually we stopped going when I started to cook more - before we planned meals, my wife would buy things & decide what dinners to make with them - but I prefer to lay out the week in advance, & if I couldn't find, say, eggplants at the Farmer's Market, it would screw up my schedule.  I began to buy my food supplies at a place I knew would have what I needed.  The Farmer's Market then because superfluous.

In 1992, I went to Mexico City.  I was in love with a girl who had been studying abroad there & we arranged to meet after she was done in Cuernavaca.  I was struck by how every street was lined with people selling things - an entire city that was a market - & felt strange after a while that I wasn't buying anything.  Like a kid in a convenience store who's just passing the time, I glanced at everyone like they might kick me out for not being a paying customer.  & once of two, I'd feel a strange sensation up against my butt, a pickpocket attempting to steal a wallet I didn't carry.  I'd turn & look at the pilferer & feel a little sorry I had nothing to steal.

When I was a kid I loved to go to this place called Treasure City, which seemed large beyond measure, which was in reality about the size of an average K-Mart.  But unlike a K-Mart, you would walk in & the front area was full of little children's rides, like horses & tiny carousels.  & if you dropped me into that place again today I would know exactly where the toy section was, & it was a mess.  There would always been lots of children there & board games would be opened & books strewn about & toys being played with.  It's a wonder they were able to stay in business, &, of course, they didn't.

Gosh, I must have been in either early middle school or late elementary school when a new Minyard's supermarket opened in the shopping center next to the apartments I lived in.  I remember the opening day because I, who had no money, managed to be one of the first hundred or so people who entered &, because of that, I got a little plant, some kind of succulent, as an opening day gift.  I wandered the aisles but was happy to find, in the back corner, two things: the magazine section, which had comic books, & the water fountain, which was right next to the magazine section.  I took the plant home & set it on my window sill & promptly forgot about it.  I'm sure my mother tossed it out eventually.

The Wikipedia article on markets - meaning marketplaces - says the first Persian markets appeared around 3000 BCE.  Five millennia of humans going to places to buy things - food, clothing, toys, housewares, anything, everything.  Isn't it crazy that when you go to the outlet mall you're basically doing the same thing the first people did when they went to the bazaar?

It's a shame, in its way, so many people do it from their computer these days.

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