Saturday morning at the farmer’s market

Saturday morning is my favorite time of the week. April through August (and later if football cooperates), I try to hit the Farmer’s Market at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds.

The rewards are many. The market is not a flea market, like you hit some places. This is a real farmer’s market. Table after table of tomatoes and peppers and corn and onions and okra and green beans. I always come home with arms full of fresh-grown vegetables, then try to talk my wife or my mom or someone into cooking it, although I’ve been experimenting with the peppers.

I also love the market because my granddaughter likes to go. My daughter and 2-year-old granddaughter are living with us while my son-in-law is deployed in Iraq. This morning, Rileybird got up early, so I sent her mom back to bed, grabbed some yogurt and we set out. She ate her yogurt on the front porch in what might be the greatest weather morning in Oklahoma history. It was about 62 degrees, a tiny mist, and mid-August. Stunning.

Then we hopped in the Mazda, picked up my mom and went to the market. Rileybird likes to see the horses, because the fairgrounds often has a horse show brewing on Saturday morning. No such luck today. But she has a high time walking around and talking to anyone who will talk back and seeing the dogs and the strollers and dancing and sticking her face in front of the huge electric fans that cool off the indoor portion of the market.

My other favorite part of the market is seeing people I don’t always get to see. Last week was rich. I saw all kinds of people, notably Sid and Jan Burton. Jan Burton worked many years in the OU athletic department as an editor of their publications, then she worked at the Norman Transcript in my last years there. Jan is one of the most passionate people I’ve ever known; crazy about her family and her friends and Barry Switzer and the Cubs. About in that order. Jan is one of the all-time great literary editors; she keeps me straight via email on grammar and such things. Attitude, too.

This week, we got to see an aunt I hadn’t seen in awhile, and for a bonus, I ran into Robert Griswold, one of my history professors at OU. Professor Griswold taught Women in Modern America, a thoroughly fascinating class, which frankly, most of my classes were. I was a double major, English and history, and I can count on one hand the number of boring history or English classes I had.