Greengrocer

Mr. Bagley returned home with a truckload of unsold vegetables. He drove a dusty-blue pickup the color of a humid sky, kitted up with produce bins and green doors that propped up to make a canopy. He must’ve had a greengrocer route similar to the Lucas Valley milk route in central Marin, over the hill, because we never saw him set up anywhere in the San Geronimo Valley. He was fairly new to the area, his large family took up two pews in the Lagunitas church. I didn’t know anything about them or where they came from. It was an unlikely convergence of events that became a moment etched in time. I was playing with Rosemary and Danny Magnussen. Taciturn Mr. Bagley didn’t say much as he counted out the day’s profits, a mere bowl of change. But his wife took it all in stride and cooked up a massive pot of rice and leftover vegetables. I remember sitting at a makeshift table on a large bulldozed flat, two old wooden doors on sawhorses turned into a table. It never occurred to the Bagleys to send us home. We were all invited to the meager feast, grubby neighborhood kids, no one was excluded. After a hard afternoon of playing kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek, yelling out olly-olly-oxen-free, come out, come out wherever you are, we were scabby wains as ravenous as vultures. I remember a mob of kids sitting around that makeshift table, seated on long planks or on tree stumps, scarfing down mountains of rice and butter, with zucchini and ketchup, like it was the last supper. I never tasted anything so good before. There was something holy and profound in that moment. It could’ve been a Dorothea Lang photograph straight out of a migrant worker camp. Mr. Bagley, sunburned and worn out from a long day selling his vegetables, gazed at us with watery eyes, then cracked open a beer, took a long drought from the amber bottle, then leaned back to take it all in as he smoked his cigarette down to the nub. In retrospect, they were probably on welfare, like many of us, the 50-pound sack of rice, from a food bank. Sometime those who had the least were the most generous. They didn’t stay long in the valley, they moved on to other pastures. Hopefully they were greener ones. What I remember is the indigo sky and the watery stars. And then, the long walk back home in the dark.

This evolved from a Facebook comment.