This Little Piggy Went to Market

I’ve always liked markets. When I was a baby, the only way I wouldn’t be cranky after my nap was if my mom popped me and my sister into the stroller while I was still almost asleep and took us to the market. This was Beirut, 1969. We would get a drink called Bone Juice and buy food.

I don’t remember any of this. It’s family legend. And I’ve always pictured Bone Juice as a brightly colored sugary drink in a little bone-shaped carton or plastic bottle. Why not? Enzo’s gummy vitamins are shaped like bones.

But as I was writing this in my head a few nights ago, it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t Bone Juice but Bon Jus, as in Good Juice, as in French. Somehow Bone Juice had lodged in some pocket of my mind and lasted forty years. We must all have these childhood scraps and misapprehensions, tucked away, untouched by time.

That makes me wonder what Enzo’s will be. Whenever I help him put on his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack we say together, "Backpack! Shark Attack! Easy-Isy-Over!" What do backpacks have to do with sharks? Nothing! I just made it up. But in his mind the two will be linked forever. (Maybe.) And whenever we fart we say, with great glee, “Gas Tax!” The other day we drove by a gas station, and I told him that that’s where you could actually pay your gas tax. And the hopelessness of ever explaining anything dawned on me for about the hundredth time. And yet kids do learn the world. They’re amazing at it.

But back to markets. I still like them—even boring old Safeway. They’re packed with life and possibility. And in Sacramento you can step into so many other worlds: The Red Sea Market on Florin (five gallon tins of olive oil from the West Bank, crates of dates, halal game hens, Bulgarian feta at incredible prices, Al Jazeera playing on the TV) to the Esperanza Mercado on Franklin (four kinds of bananas, brown sugar in a huge cone-shaped lumps, pig’s feet and cow’s feet and octopus). And then there’s the Asian Farmer’s Market on Sundays, set up in an abandoned gas station, where you can buy live chickens and roosters or fresh soy milk and where oranges and sweet potatoes are about half the price they charge at the regular farmer’s market, a few blocks down and over. And the Asian grocery a few blocks down has these beautiful ancient oak chests behind the counter where they store medicinal herbs. You can get huge pieces of curled cinnamon bark about a foot long. I don’t know what to do with a foot a cinnamon, but just knowing it’s out there makes me feel alive with possibility.