Southside Farmer’s Market
5875 Everhart Rd
Corpus Christi, TX 78413
Saturday, 9:00am – 11:30ish
This morning found my wife and I at Price’s Chef. It has kept its character through a change of ownership, and that’s no small feat. We used to eat there more often when she lived a little further South off Alameda, occasionally riding bikes there and back. Talk of politics can be overheard, like stinky cigar smoke mingling with the coffee at once disgusting you and making you want to light up.
From there headed over to the Farmer’s Market. I go out there first Saturdays and sharpen knives. It doesn’t make much money, but I like doing it. It’s a great place to talk to people you don’t know who are to a person nice and interested in the place we live.
It sits in the parking lot of, among other businesses, the Palace where we will often find pieces of costumes, beer bottles, and single stripper heels. This shoe was all the way out in the street as if she spun around so fast on the pole that it crashed through a limo-tint window and all the way out to the suicide lane. I’m a married man and I don’t go to strip clubs, but I couldn’t honestly say I’d never been to this one before. I have made significant contributions to the tuitions of numerous ‘struggling single moms.’
Next we hit the Fruit King on Morgan. We walked out with two more boxes of ripe fruit and vegetables. Inspirational music played through the stereo, and each transaction came with a blessing from the lady behind the register. I have a somewhat strained relationship with organized religion. I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchens and it doesn’t make it any easier to appreciate, but being blessed couldn’t hurt, and people being respectful of one another can’t be bad. What galls me is when religion is used to divide people. This goes back to politics. This week’s announcement of Rick Perry’s bid for President is truly chilling, with the combination of a leader who has done so much wrong in Texas and an electorate that is either informed and hopeless or ignorant and involved. It’s easy to argue against a lot of the crackpot nonsense of the fringe Right and the Tea Party, but it is hard to dispute that our government is broken; that it is being consumed by the long lived cancer of greed, and is little more now that a delivery system of money from those that work to those that don’t. But I keep my nose to the whetstone and work on what I can control, and I can keep hope, and keep a fiction of a better place in my head.