We make the market

It is the mustard at Salumeria that makes the sandwich. It is the powdered sugar that completes the plumped-out Beiler's doughnuts dough. It is the molten mess of chocolate inside the Famous 4th Street cookies that renders us speechless. It is the sweet in the savory of the Original Turkey specials that you remember later, that you speak about, to friends.

"The long line of stalls stretching away and diminishing, hung with all manner of farm-yard and forest marketry; the crowds coming and going in the main avenue; the receding rows of lights overhead; the color, the movement, the life - who can describe it? Dazzling and bewildering as a whole, it is enjoyable only when studied in its details. . . . You can find everything here in its season, and better than you can find it anywhere else."

Those words were published in 1876, in Edward Strahan's A Century After, about a "Farmer's Market at Twelfth and Market streets." The writer may have been speaking of "calves, sheep, and swine," "potatoes, corn, wheat," "peaches, plums, pears," and "partridges, woodcock, snipe, reed-birds, rail, and canvas-back ducks." But he was speaking, mostly, of the experience. The pleasant yammering of the crowds. The craning of the necks. The anticipation.

Try some.

Earth. Griddle. Fryer. Canisters. Cartons. Buckets of ice. The back edge of a knife. Silver skewers and plastic shovels. Open hands. The Reading Terminal Market fare all comes from somewhere.

And so do the unlonesome crowds.

It is almost Thanksgiving. Outside, the air has that leaves-have-fallen bite, the convention crowd is surging, the traffic is in budge mode. Inside, coats are hooked over the crooks of arms, the fingers of the piano player insouciantly glide, the flour rises to cumulus heights in the sky above the Flying Monkey, shellfish shiver, and there's a bright, mad game of musical chairs going down among the lunchtime crowd.

This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.

All these turkeys taken from the farms (and plucked). All that pumpkin in the pies. All the eggs in their cartons and the preserves in their rows and the coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig. Everyone feeling more generous now, defying the coming dark of winter and the drone of bad news with clustered flowers and extra ketchup and some pre-turkey chowder.

The crowd is jammed into Molly Malloy's. It is shoulder-to-shoulder by the Termini Brothers biscotti. It is taking shelter in the Down Home Diner, appraising the ducks at Sang Kee, angling for stool space at Profi's Creperie, calculating the expression on the well-shod figurehead who gleams from her perch above Pearl's Oyster Bar. Is she angry? Is she love-struck? Is she sad?

The crowd is, and maybe we are what we eat, but I'm of the opinion that we are also the tall bar stool, the burgeoning paper bag, the sticky chocolate fingers, not just the piano but also its tip jar, the figurehead, the sheltering roof. I am convinced that we go to the Market not just to buy, but to be part of the crowd, to fit ourselves inside it, to confirm that here, at least, we are part of something, we are in this together, this season soon to come.

We stand in lines exchanging recipes. We offer tips on thawing time. We establish stuffing preferences, reveal the secrets of our soups, point to a stall across the way where they have (we're sure) just what this man beside us needs. Our bags are fat with poultry, cranberries, squash, bouquets of mint and basil, cake. Our bags are: What we have chosen. What we plan to carry home. What we believe about the gifts we're capable of. Our bags represent the care we mean to take of the people we love, the family and friends who will be coming soon.

At the Reading Terminal Market, against the backdrop of texture, taste, and smell, our season begins. To strangers we tell stories about the idiosyncratic dish, the flecked black pepper, the cakes our mothers made. To people we'll likely never see again, we say, I'm hoping for . . . .

And then we go on, unhook our coats from the crooks of our arms, and head back out into the nipped air and toward our homes, where the color, the movement, the life will continue to unfold.