Neighborhood Market, Paris – Marie Hamel
Someone incredibly young was regaling me recently about a stay in Paris with the family of a friend she had met in college.
“They live in a real neighborhood,” she enthused. You know… one with little shops. There’s actually a bakery and a butcher shop and a kind of farmer’s market with produce out in the street! It’s a real neighborhood.”
At first I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about. Neighborhood markets still exist in most cities, don’t they? And, of course, when you live in Paris or, for that matter, any other French city or town, you do your marketing at the boulangerie, the patisserie and the fromagerie as a matter of course, n’est-ce pas? I know that the supermarkets and big box stores have probably invaded there, too, but still…
Tom and Sam Andrews Store, Oysterville c., 1915
And then I realized that the young woman who was telling me all this ‘news’ had grown up in the burbs of California and probably had no notion of a ‘neighborhood’ being anything beyond a collection of single-family houses – as in residential only. She was used to doing her shopping at malls and outlet stores and in the city center. I’m fairly certain she knew about bakeries – at least in the doughnut and scone sense if not in the fresh bread sense of the meaning – but had she ever actually been to a butcher’s shop? Or to a little old-fashioned corner grocery store?
When I was in elementary school, we lived in Alameda on Versailles Avenue just a half a block from busy Encinal Boulevard. I well remember the small bakery a few doors from our house where, during WWII, we would line up on baking days with our rationing books in hand. And I remember the butcher at the market across the street. He was a big exuberant man who called me “Syd Syd the Chinese kid” for no reason that I could think of, but his laughter and friendliness made me overlook his blood spattered apron and the saws and cleavers on the huge butcher block behind him.
An old fashioned concept?
I suppose memories like that seem from the ‘olden days’ now. Just as my mother’s memories of getting a bag of candy when they paid their bill at Sam Andrews Store here in Oysterville always seemed a quaint old-fashioned sort of memory to me. And are there still places that deliver groceries as a matter or course?
I wonder what the little kids of today will tell their grandchildren a few generations down the road. I can’t think that trudging the endless aisles at the gigantic CostCo or Fred Meyers stores in Warrenton will hold any warm fuzzy memories for anyone. But… I could be wrong. I think I was once before!
You’re right, Sydney. The shops on the corner are largely gone. In Gig Harbor I am 4 miles from shops. In Ilwaco the Ilwaco Market is only 6 blocks away, but it has become “emergency only” place. Fortunately, when Nadir and Amy were much younger they would walk down there to buy pop and candy in the same way I walked from my grandparents’ beach house in Seaview to Sugarman’s Store. Joe Sugarman was a lovely man. He kept penny candy in a box on the counter and he could wiggle his ears which was well worth the walk from our house, even when I didn’t have money for a comic or pop. Where do children make those kind of relationships now? They don’t unless they are lucky enough to live in a small enough berg to develop them.