Debasing myself UPDATED

A consumer's lament

The Consumer, what a thing. No one wants to be that. Yet here we all are, consuming.

I went to the farmer’s market alone, a rare treat (?). It’s more fun with kids, but also more chaotic, more complicated on the actually buying produce front. I can never tell if buying ingredients is the point of the farmer’s market—of this specific one or of any of them I suppose. But I am OK with spending more for the better vegetables. I would go so far as to say that I am an enthusiast of this activity. It’s one of the few qualities that puts me in step with my milieu, so I’ll take it.

So I made the rounds, got a vat of plums, some end-of-season peaches, start-of-season pears (duly paying in cash, the “preferred” method), arugula, kale, carrots, tomatoes, bok choy the price of which makes me wince when my children inevitably pick it out of their stir-fries, so the idea is to put just enough on their plates that I can say in good faith that we offer a vegetable but not so much that we’re just throwing away weight-in-gold vegetables. A normal-priced baguette. Ran into a colleague and chatted about work.

Then I thought, I am alone, I can get the oysters. There’s an oyster stand where you can spend like 5 minutes eating a tasting platter of 4 oysters, but this is beyond what’s possible with kids there so I thought, it’s on. I started remembering why I never do this. I had all these bags, everything was damp from on-off rain, it was awkward, made me feel awkward.

As I was dealing with this unwieldy array of embarrassing-purchase-filled tote bags, it suddenly struck me as an odd thing to be doing, sitting and eating oysters alone. The colleague and I had been discussing a book I’m reviewing, whose author is—how to put this suavely?—extremely popular. Not as in popular literature but many-cool-friend-having. Surely she would never, or if she did, it would be to make some sort of literary gesture about solitude. But I felt like having the oysters and couldn’t make a time or money argument against doing so.

I got home and started unpacking all $89204389324 worth of vegetables only to discover that certain among them simply were not there. Where was the bok choy? The carrots? It was this moment of panicked denial, as there were just a few minutes when I could do some more work before pickup before after-bedtime-work and I had to find these vegetables. They had to be in my house. They were not.

This went where it would have to. I went back through the muddy park, back to the farmers market, which was by this point lively with post-rain, post-pickup families. I now felt guilty being there without my kids. But in the most excellent news of all, the tote bag filled with the missing vegetables was right where I’d left it. I went back through the park with the vegetables. The usual bits of bok choy made their way to the compost.

And now, for the die-hards, a running sneaker update.