From the Editor’s Desk

The best fishmonger I ever knew worked a stall you could not miss and could not move. Everything else at that market drifted — the honey people migrated with the sun, the knife-sharpener orbited the parking lot, whole rows of canopies picked up and re-formed like weather. The fish stall had stood in the same twelve feet since before anyone could establish, and when I asked him once why he’d never taken a better spot, he said the regulars don’t want a better spot, they want the spot. A market, he said, is mostly a river. Somebody has to be the rock.

Standing still turns out to be a way of seeing. The river introduces itself to a rock. He knew which chef was in trouble before the restaurant did, which widower had lately switched to cooking for one, which kid pocketing samples would grow up to run a kitchen two towns over. He never left his twelve feet, and he knew everything. Traveling teaches you geography; staying put teaches you people, because eventually every story in town walks past your counter.

And speaking of the ones who stand still while the whole world walks up — this week’s three stories are all keepers at their counters: a border booth in the February murk, a book stall’s two-dollar hardback with sixty years of voices in it, and a fire seller at the cold end of a mountain market. Take them home. They keep well. And when they’ve warmed you, pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Caravanserai — the market is a stop on a route, and someone is only passing through. Pull in for the night; leave changed at dawn.)

— The Editor