The search for soul.

Once a month or so, we make the trek down to the big smoke to go to the Central Market there in the city. We go there to buy those certain foods or condiments one cannot get in The Barossa supermarkets, and it is also a bright venture of a day out for us “quiet country folk”, though the traffic can be rather chaotic at times, and don’t get me started on the “types” one sees there!

But as I was saying, down the Adelaide Central Market, between Marino’s butchers and where Samtass fish market used to be, there is a walk-through breezeway to Gouger Street. Years ago there was an arcade type stall there selling second-hand books, it was run by a bloke in his fifties, if I recall, I used to browse there when I was going past.

At the end nearest the street, there was a tray holding hundreds and hundreds of these ”penny dreadfuls” I suppose you’d call them, not even with a cardboard cover, but just some lurid pic on glossy paper with around 50 pages or so stapled in a folded booklet type thing. Many of them so old and dog-eared as to be almost a throwaway item.

I asked the man behind the stall there about them.

“What are all these scribbled, symbols and initials inside the front cover?” I asked.

“That’s the personal initial or tag to identify that someone has read the story”. He replied. He then continued on, ” I get orders from several old folk’s homes for them, so I bundle up about a dozen or so at the time and deliver them there on my way home. “

“What do they sell for?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Oh, there’s only sentimental value in them” he informed me “ I sell them to the people in the homes for 50 cents each, they read them over some months, mark them with that special tag and then I buy them back off them for 25cents each and they go round and round. I know all their tags now, so I send them ones they haven’t read yet, they are slow readers and it keeps them content.”

I skimmed through some of the copies, they were mostly blatant romance or westerns with a romantic theme. On the front would be a “gunslinger” type or some “muscled young man”, his sleeves rolled up and a touch of “action man grime” in just the right places, with his arm around a heavily bouffanted “gal” and that determined look on a “chiselled jaw” face, that type of thing.

“ I wonder what they see in them?” I pondered “They all seem to be about the same”, and I thumbed a copy.

“Yes, I wondered on that too once. ” the seller said “And I asked this German woman who was a regular customer here at the stall.”

“Do you buy them for the romantic story?” I asked her.

“No, no,” she replied, “ I am too old for the fictional romance, though I do like reading that side of it, but I really read them to get …” and she struggled for the right words, ” … to remember the FEELING, the feeling of the emotion of romance, like when you were young, one forgets the feelings, you can remember the doing of some things, but the feelings of those moments slip away and I want to recreate, to feel,  the emotion of those times and sometimes, not often, but just sometimes I get that feeling back when I read these things.”

“I would never have thought of it that way” I remarked, but I was much younger then. Now, a much older man, I know exactly what she means, I too now have what must be similar beautiful memories, and I like to at moments hold or “freeze-frame” those moments and to then plunge into my emotional reserves to surround that memory with the appropriate emotions and sensual feeling, to marry the moment with the desire, it is a difficult thing, but sometimes it just works, and it is a wonderful feeling, like that memory of a first kiss.

 

 

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