Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The Moldy Pear


I used to live near Haymarket, a farmer’s market in Boston, when I was a little kid. Every Sunday the fruit and vegetable guys would be out selling off whatever crates they had left over from the week. Giant stacked boxes of unsold or overripe fruits and vegetables, whatever you wanted, give ’em two bucks and take the whole thing. No looking, buy it and deal with it on your own time. They lined up their trucks and were selling off the boxes to anyone who would bid and be willing to go through all the saggy and overripe product to find the good ones that were always mixed in there. If you were willing to look.

My Dad and I would walk around all morning, eating popcorn and watching the free market chaos in all its loud, shouty glory. We would buy an entire box of cucumbers for a few bucks and then dig through and pull out the eight or nine good ones like we’d won the lottery. We’d tally up how much each would’ve cost in the supermarket and figure out how much we’d saved with our Sunday morning ingenuity. My dad would negotiate with whatever was being slung out of the trucks no matter how little we actually wanted it. An entire crate of week old oranges or a huge waxed box filled with rapidly softening pears. But he’d buy it for three or four bucks and then we’d go through it like it was Christmas. It was part bargain hunt, part weekend adventure. Down by Faneuil Hall. Down by the wharf with my Dad.

I bring that nostalgic and fond memory because once we bought a box of peaches that appeared okay when we glanced at it, but when we went through it it was completely unsalvageable. The only time that had ever happened to me and my Dad. We’d only paid a few bucks for it, but still. We were always able to find at least five or six perfectly good fruits or vegetables in the box. In this case, not one. This time they were all rotten, saggy and moldy.

Which brings me back to the douchebag featured in this pic. Rotten, saggy and moldy. Unsalvageable.

But hey, at least it brought back a fond memory of me and my dad.

# posted by douchebag1

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