Have you ever had the experience in which you hear something, read something, or some random thought just pops into your head, to which you respond, “Sweet Georgia Brown. That’s it!”? All of a sudden, all sorts of misfit bits of information come together in a clear, recognizable pattern that feels so right, it can’t possibly be anything but the answer that eluded you up to that point.
I had that experience recently while trapped in a series of misadventures not of my own choosing. While discussing options at the end of a long, tedious day, one of my fellow travelers suggested stopping by a nearby eatery. Another responded to the suggestion as follows: “I should eat. I am getting kind of rage-y.” Like a tiger claiming a slab of raw meat sliding in under its cage door, her left hand hooked in the air like a claw.
My epiphany was not that I also get rage-y when I do not eat; since my infancy, my parents recognized the imperative of feeding my inner tiger at the appropriate times. No, the other shoe dropping was the recognition of why in the world I sometimes failed to run my words through my usual word filter. It “should” maintain a barrier between sharp-edged sarcasm (my native language, appearing in full-blown Technicolor in my brain) and a calm, outwardly poker-face demeanor I usually attempt to project toward the world at large. More particularly, I suddenly recognized the cause of a less-than-kind response to an occasional question or comment on the part of our beloved customers at the Presque Isle Farmers Market on a Saturday morning.
Like most other Market vendors, I am up late and rise early to get products harvested, washed, packaged, weighed, labeled, packed up, and transported to the market site by opening time. We want to bring our very best to our customers. But if I ate a quick breakfast at 4 a.m., worked several hours to get everything ready, loaded, and transported to the Market before opening, then stood on the asphalt for several hours before a given customer’s arrival, I may very well have lapsed over into rage-y.
We vendors genuinely like our customers, welcome questions about what and how we do what we do, and listen carefully to comments and suggestions that would improve our products or fill a heretofore unrecognized want or need. To a large degree, that is one of the biggest reasons why we retail in the Aroostook Centre Mall parking lot between 8:30 and 1:00, rather than wholesale through a middleman.
I just need to remember to eat.
Next week: some questions or comments that may inadvertently poke a stick at the tiger.
The Presque Isle Farmer’s market’s president is Kevin Ehst of Hidden Meadow Farm in Bridgewater. For information about participating or visiting the market, contact him at 425-4050 or via email at kevins@ehst.com.
