Slip Sliding Away

Tim Porter

This is a photo from the Farmer's Market in San Rafael that I took for a local magazine. (See it bigger.) I wrote this little vignette to run with it:

It’s big. It’s bouncy. It’s really, really yellow. What’s not to like when you’re three-and-a-half?

The Sunday morning Farmers’ Market in the San Rafael Civic Center is part food festival, part al fresco breakfast nook and – especially when the winter sun is shining – part carnival for kids. Young Marcus Balano was there on a recent Sunday with his dad, Matt, and discovered that a 22-foot-high inflatable slide is way more fun than looking at piles of parsnips or leafing through layers of organic chard. Root vegetables? Ecch! Let’s play, Dad!

For the 150-plus farmers, bakers and ranchers who rise before dawn to ensure that stalls of organic produce, fresh butter and crusty breads greet the first of the day’s typical 5,000 visitors, the Farmers’ Market is all about food – and business. But for many of those visitors, the market serves as the modern town square, a place to caffeinate, to graze, to stroll and loll about a bit, and to play the grown-up game of seeing and being seen.

With age, we put away our childish things. But the next time you’re at the Sunday market, take a break from the rutabagas (a very adult vegetable), visit the kid zone and remember what writer Joseph Heller said in one of his novels: “When I grow up. I want to be a little boy.”