A small social experiment

One of the charming quirks of living in New York are the pushcarts selling fruits and vegetables on the street corners. There are several in my neighborhood. I generally buy from the nice Turkish man who sells near the corner of Broadway and 96th street.

You never know exactly what will be on sale from day to day. There is something very lovely about selecting a couple of pounds of what you want and handing the money over directly to the same person summer and winter.

This morning I went to the stand to buy some vegetables for dinner. I noticed that the man who runs the pushcart was nowhere to be seen. I began to make my selections. I weighed out a pound of beautiful okra, selected a package of peppers and a heavy pomegranate.

As I made my selections several other people stopped by the pushcart and chose their bananas or tomatoes. One would expect that people might have taken their selection without paying. After all, this is New York.

After about ten minutes there were about five or six of us trying to figure out what to do. Some of the people holding their selections of fruits or vegetables were clearly on their way to work. Should we hide our money under one of the strawberry boxes? Should we continue to wait? Has something befallen our pushcart vendor? We all stood around the pushcart holding our intended purchases trying to figure out what to do.

After a long while, our vendor came out of a nearby store where I assume he had gone in to use their rest-room. We all lined up to pay.

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sarah in nyc

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