cy mba l s
2 021 : met hod a nd mad nes s
Sunday Market “Should I grab the apples, or should you? Sorry, I don’t know how to do the social distancing stuff.” The amount of times I’ve had this interaction working the farmer’s market each Sunday is astounding, but justified. My answer is entirely situation-dependent, and would appear totally random to someone watching me do this all day, if anyone ever did that. And for the most part, it is. I usually say, “It doesn’t matter,” offering them the token cheap brown paper bag to dump their produce in. Then it’s their move. Often, if they’re around twenty-five years old with blue and purple hair and their own t-shirt bag, they’ll tenuously reach into the produce basket, being sure to take what they touch, and place their produce gently in the bag they gave me to hold open. “There we go,” they say, upticking at the beginning and end of their sentence, in case I can’t read their enthusiasm from behind their mask. If they’re over forty with a staple Karen side-bob and wrung out husband by their side who thinks “Everything looks pretty nice, honey,” they’ll definitely pick the stuff themselves. They probably also showed up at eight-thirty even though we don’t open until nine. Now, they really make sure to go through each and every piece of fruit, to ensure they’re not ripped off fifty cents every pound lest their apple have a spot on it. Trust me when I say it takes every ounce of my strength to not yell at these imbeciles for touching everything. I’d probably slap their hands away, but that wouldn’t be very social-distancey of me. And I kinda get it, everyone wants to get good fruit. But I wouldn’t put it out for sale if it were bad, and touching everything in general is nasty, even when there’s not a pandemic. The third iteration of customers are the Boomers. These are typically well-mannered elderly couples, one with a bleached blow-out and the other holding his wife’s soaps and knit hats and whatnot that she already bought at the front of the market. They tell me that they want me to pick out the best fruit for them. “I trust you, dear. Just get me a few good ones.” I don’t mind them so much. This system pretty much encompasses anyone who would be at a Sunday farmer’s market. But there’s a special place in Hell for this one guy who likes to complain about our tomatoes. To preface, not one other person has ever had a single negative thing to say about our tomatoes, and we usually can’t get them to 82
