11-Dec-99 Flea Market
We didn't take our stamps to the RISD holiday alumni sale today. Charley has decided, at least for this time, that if he participates in those sales he wants to show his photos rather than be known as part of our stamp business. That was really OK with Arlene and me. We like having extra cash around from those sales, but we like having our weekends, too.
Instead, we went shopping at Jolly Jim's fleamarket at the Shriners' auditorium in Wilmington.
Jolly Jim, if he's even a real person, used to run fleamarkets in the so-called Northeast Trade Center in Woburn. That building was where my father worked in the mid 1950s when it was Sylvania Electric's Woburn plant. Sylvania moved out long long ago, and for years it was a shell of a building used for trade show space. I remember going to a computer expo there in, hmm, probably 1978, when everybody was impressed at computers that could play music at all -- the big thing was to show that your processor was fast enough to play a recognizable, if tinny, 1-voice version of Joplin's "The Entertainer" (theme song from The Sting). Anyway, the Sylvania building was torn down a couple of years ago and the fleamarket had to move.
I don't know why the Shriners decided to build a place for their circus up in Wilmington. It's probably fifteen miles from Boston, not particularly close to Lowell, off in an industrial park. The space where the fleamarket was looks like a large high school gym, with seats that push against the walls like gym bleachers.
We hadn't gone to Jolly Jim's in years, probably not since we started the stamp business. We won't go again for years. There was practically nothing interesting there. Most of the vendors had imported junk, not interesting old stuff that I still hope to see at fleamarkets.
Back home we made kreplach from the leftover turkey. Kreplach (that's the plural; singular, krepple) look just like won tons. They're just another one of the ways that people a few generations back used to stretch meat and vary the menu. I made some noodles and Arlene ground up the turkey in a meatgrinder. We have a ravioli attachment for the pasta machine, but Arlene wanted the kreplach to be as much like her grandmother's as possible, so we rolled the dough out, cut it into squares, and folded up the kreplach by hand. A few minutes in the soup, and supper was ready.
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