Kiss THESE shorts

I saw these on a guy the other night behind the stage at the farmer's market and immediately though, "Perfect for Friday!"

It was a good night at the market. Besides the KISS shorts, I saw a lot of friends I hadn't seen in awhile, and picked up a beautiful loaf of walnut sourdough bread, a dozen gorgeous brown and white eggs, two glossy purple torpedo onions and several tomatoes so ripe I had to take them home in a special little padded box.

There's paving going on in the parking area where the market is usually set up, so this week the city closed one block bounding the east side of the park and all the vendors set up in the street. It was such a great arrangement compared to the way it usually is, all cramped and claustrophobic in an obstacle-course of a municipal parking area.

And I wasn't the only one talking about it. The whole feeling of the market was transformed by the new ability to move easily among the stalls – and to actually SEE not just the food and other things for sale, but all the other people, too. In general, if you run into someone you know at the market in its usual location, you can't really stop and talk without either creating an instant and serious traffic jam, or taking the time to walk away from the market until you can get out of the flow of shoppers. So it isn't that people never stop and talk, but just more that it isn't effortless and natural to do so. With the new layout, it is.

Anyway, I loved it and I'm really hoping they'll decide to keep it there. In fact, I'm planning to write a letter to the editor suggesting it, and send copies to a couple of friends who are on the city council. It makes me happy to think of doing that, even if nothing comes of it, and who knows, maybe something will. Another friend in city government told me that if enough people want it to happen, it probably will.

This is something I really like about living in a small town vs. a city: I feel like I actually have some ability to influence what happens. It's not about the size of the community, exactly. I think even living in a city most people's circle of friends isn't any bigger than it would be in a small town. How many people can one person really be "friends" with? A hundred? Two or three hundred? Once you hit your max, it really doesn't matter how many other people there are. Everyone has only so much time to spend on relationships, and a city neighborhood functions a lot like a small town anyway, if you make the effort to get involved. So I'm not saying they're exactly the same, just that socially, except for possibly the greater opportunity in a city to constantly be enlarging your circle, they're not all that different. (Of course, I could be wrong.)

In any case, the point I wanted to make was that I think in a city I would be much less likely to be friends with the mayor, or the city planner, or council members, or the editor of the newspaper, or any other influential public figure. In a place like this though it's easy to know those people. You could probably even BE one of those people, if you really want to.

Personally, I'm a more behind-the-scenes kind of person than that, which is why it's nice to know those folks who are out in front – because I do have strong opinions about a lot of things, but I don't necessarily want to be the one giving the presentation about it.

Urgh. Is all this fascinating enough for you yet? In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that what I'm really doing here is not writing a blog post but avoiding getting started on the mountain of work I've been putting off since Monday, "until the weekend." Okay, so it's a small mountain. I just really don't want to work any more today ... it's Friday night, and tomorrow Mr. A will be back from Texas and the whole energy of the house will be totally different again. So what the hell. I'm going to give myself the night off.