There Once was a Market
Just down the road and behind a John Wayne mural and a stone facade and a BBQ shack adorned with a rusty metal pig or maybe a cow – but probably a pig – was housed that convergence of convenience, character, and improvisation unique to small towns, a Market, The Market, rife with shelves upon shelves upon shelves of the essentials, nothing fancy, gummi butterflies and frogs, cheese balls, bulk spices, and, in spite of chicken breasts remarkable only in the variance of their size, one day gargantuan, the next, McNugget, and homemade BBQ that was a little too watery, one of the finest meat counters anyone could ask for tended to by people who clearly enjoyed their jobs and knew me only as “Runner Guy.”
But, things, as they are wont to do, changed a couple of years back when a stroke temporarily felled The Market’s mustachioed, heat-packing proprietor/butcher/real estate agent with an apparent aversion to corn starch in his BBQ sauce, and permanently slayed his (rumoured) designs of opening a BBQ restaurant in the downstairs section of the building (formerly home to a sewing machine repair shop); the writing, in retrospect, was on the wall and on John Wayne’s forehead and, indeed, it wouldn’t be long before the writing was on the sign that had, just a day prior, hawked BOGO Chips ‘n’ Dip, “Closing sale: 10% off entire store.”
As the summer weeks wore on, the sale, like the temperature, increased in increments of ten percent until the day of the shuttering if not the acceptance – but at least we still have the Dollar Store, some said; a Dollar Store, which, because of corporate policies dictating their restocking capcities, was quickly depleted of staples and essentials and was staffed by people as dismayed about the vanishing of The Market as I – and it wasn’t long before the auctioneers and their attendant carrion descended to disembowel The Market of its shelving and the meat slicer and even the metal pig or maybe it was a cow but I think it was a pig, to pick at the bones of its character, before the interregnum of vacancy and scuttlebutt – it was going to be, it was going to be, just had to be, surely someone, surely – and then came the surveyors and, as temperatures dropped and winter descended, so too did The Someones, with their little flags and their backhoes and their Bell Store logo-adorned trucks to tranform The Market into nothing but a pile of multi-colored John Wayne bricks and cinder blocks pissed upon with sub-zero water by a blurry someone with a hose, the last flickers of its small-town character extinguished on the half-cocked march towards yet another franchise highway pit stop, a brick and mortar facade possessed of character found only in its decided lack thereof and capacity for rural metastasis.
