To Market

I spent a fair portion of my day yesterday piping at a local Farmers’ Market.  It was pretty awesome. I was just busking, but the citizens of Troy were kind and either way it was certainly quality practice time. 

I got more than money, too. I garnered a bag of fresh, lovely greens, and the vendors across the way who were from a local orchard gave me a bottle of cider and an apple. Best of all, a very young boy, who signed his name “John,” drew a picture of me*^ piping and left it in my case. That’s definitely going on my wall.

I also met a very nice relative of mine, previously we were only known to one another via the magic of the internet. It was, all in all, a very rewarding morning.

Farmers’ Markets, and particularly this one, are great places to watch people. There are the people who don’t seem to see or hear you, the people who shuffle by looking guilty, the people who nod stiffly and avert their gaze, the people who smile and enjoy and drop a bit of money, and the moms and dads who I watch out of the corner of my eye as they put a dollar bill in their 3 year old’s hand and make the familiar gesture to my case, “go ahead and drop it in. It’s safe.” ** To all of them I extend my hearty thanks, they all provide something.

Then there are people who come up and start dancing and clapping, which is interesting and entertaining, or people who try to talk to me while I’m playing assuming, I think, that I can talk because my mouth is free,***  unfortunately for them, I cannot. It takes all my powers of concentration to summon even the phrase, “thank you” while I’m playing. To do that I have to tilt my head to one side so all my remaining free brain cells can roll together in order for me to form an understandable word. Even so, whatever I’m trying to say still sometimes ends up rather garbled.  More often I try to stick to nodding and smiling. No matter what some of the hardcore feminist authors I’ve had to read lately say about women smiling too much, I still feel that it's a pretty good way to get you into, or out of, almost any given situation, or at least make it better.****^^

*I’m assuming it was me anyway because I was the only person there with pipes; I have super-cool purple eyes in the drawing. 

^Oddly, this is not the first time this drawing thing has happened.

**I try not to look too scary when I play, it was easier in this case because I was using bellows pipes.

***These asterisks are to represent all the dirty jokes I didn’t make here and that you may be thinking.

****Unless, for example, you’re a little kid and you’ve just accidentally set the house on fire, a situation where you’ll almost definitely smile and where you definitely shouldn't do so when you have to go explain to your parents.

^^ And I don't mean smiling in a "womanly wiles" way.