Saturday Market, 1952

Every Saturday when I was very young my family would go to the market to shop for groceries. It became a ritual that I enjoyed until I grew old enough to beg to stay home with my friends. We lived in a small house on the side of a hill in Monterey Park, Calif. and the market was located on Garvey Avenue one step off of the sidewalk. The entire front of the market welcomed us with open accordion doors made of wood.

Bright oranges, red apples and green cucumbers with rich earthy aromas were piled in bins, tempting shoppers to pick them up and buy them. The shaded north-facing storefront offered a cool escape from the hot sunshine into an enticing world of soups, cereals, cookies and crackers. But the best item was found in the freezer bin -- delicious creamy ice cream that would be our Saturday afternoon dessert.

My mama, Dorothy, wore a dress. Pants suits were not known to me, if they even existed. Her dresses were always light-colored and sometimes featured a floral pattern. She was not one for dark colors, especially black, the word alone she pronounced as if it were the color of death. "BLACK." She would shake her head at the thought. She held that view throughout her life, always avoiding black clothing. Those Saturdays were designed for breezy blue and yellow dresses.

My daddy, Frank, wore slacks, a short-sleeved collared shirt and leather shoes. To me, those were the duds of a dad. I learned that word, "duds," from him, which he called fancy clothes, like those worn by TV cowboys including Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown and Tex Ritter: shirts with ornate piping and fringe on the sleeves, scarves around their necks and boots with embossed patterns. His wardrobe was much plainer, yet as he aged and society became more casual toward men's and women's apparel, he started to wear Western-style duds and blue jeans. He loved country-Western music and got a kick out of learning that singer Tennessee Ernie Ford lived in the red house above our neighborhood.

    You load sixteen tons and what do you get

 another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me cause I can't go 

I owe my soul to the company store

At least a working man could get a day off which made Saturday our grocery-shopping day. My dad worked about six miles from our house at the main U.S. Post Office in downtown Los Angeles.

He drove us to the market in his Studebaker. My mother didn't drive or even consider getting her license. She didn't trust cars and mechanical things, preferred to do everything by hand, or on foot. I've seen a picture of her as a young woman riding a horse, but never near an automobile. The trip to market depended upon my dad.

Sometimes we waited in the car while my mother shopped: my dad, me and my younger sister, Mimi. That was her nickname, given to her by herself. "Me, me-me." She could not pronounce her real name, Mary. An adult neighbor of ours said to me, "I know that's me-me Are you, you-you?" I guess he thought he was being funny. I found it annoying. I didn't get the joke.

My dad parked his car in the lot behind the market. While waiting for my mom, I lay on the back seat, soothing myself by running my finger tips over the woven upholstery, staring into the blue sky, listening to the rumble of car engines, peoples' voices and slamming of heavy metal doors. 

I had heard my parents talking about trees and flowers. They referred to them by name, rhododendrons, hibiscus and geraniums. Wide-leafed banana trees adorned with green and yellow bananas grew in our front yard. Stalks of greenish-red rhubarb sprouted in the dirt next to our house, from which my mom  baked rhubarb pie, a family favorite. She poured lots of sugar into the bowl with the chopped pieces of celery-like rhubarb, creating a syrupy sauce that gave the tart rhubarb a tangy, almost sweet flavor, which tasted even better with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

"What's the name of this tree?" I asked my dad, pointing at the large tree next to our car, mesmerized by the mighty trunk and gnarled bark. Long branches covered with thin green leaves hung from the tree like the cloak of a king. The canopy produced a wonderful, shady place in the parking lot.

"It's a pepper tree," he said.

A pepper tree, I thought to myself, a strange name for this magnificent tree. I imagined small bits of hot black pepper hidden on the narrow leaves. I didn't realize that pinkish-red peppercorns would appear when it flowered.

Since that particular Saturday in 1952, whenever I see a pepper tree, its feathery leaves, drooping branches and thick muscular trunk, I can sniff the woodsy fragrance from memory and feel the easy comfort of my family.

© 2021 Kevin Samson from working-title memoir Silence of the Oranges.