Market memories

For our anniversary, Jim and I escaped to Seattle for the weekend and spent Saturday night at the Inn at the Market (courtesy of a gift certificate Jim won as a door prize at work). It was fun to get away together, and to be in a place that held so many memories for me.

I used to skip class with my best friend Holly and take a bus down to the Market, sit at a cafe several floors above the market center, and people watch for hours at a time. My first job in high school was working at a Market bead store, strictly under the table for $25 a day. I remember how at the full moon, all the pimps, dealers, ghosts, and really weird people would suddenly come out of the cracks and become fully visible even down in the mezzanine where I worked. This was a world so foreign from the home life my parents created that I was entranced and terrified all at once because it, too, came to feel like home.

Jim and I prowled around for as long as my swelling feet allowed, bought bagels from the Three Girls Bakery where I used to buy sandwiches, potato salad and an apple fritter for lunch, then searched the Post Alley in vain for an Italian place (name long since forgotten) that used to have the most piquant parmesan cheese. Some things were different, but many still the same. What surprised me most was that it still smelled exactly as I remembered: that unmistakeable combination of assorted human smells, decomposing vegetable matter, and fish; somehow repellant and yet intoxicating at the same time.