Where the Sun Sets Over the Water

There is shop, as Ian would say, in the bowels of Pike Place Market. I do not know what it is called.

I know that if you walk down a slippery ramp, and pass by the gummy bear giant made out of smaller gummy bears, and take a left once you see the stacks of vintage Playboys, you'll see it.

It's the kind of shop that I love, the kind that I can spend hours in, looking at every piece of merchandise they have. There are antique shops in Bellingham with crates of old clothes and stacks of ceramic dishes and boxes of photographs that Kili and I have literally gotten lost in, accidentally wandering out two hours after we went in, thinking we had been there for half an hour, forty five minutes.

The shop in Pike Place is filled with vintage posters, old photographs, mimeographs and originals of 1924 Sports pages. Propaganda posters from the two world wars--DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE: ENLIST below a gorilla certainly makes me want to fight the Huns. Early editions of Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone magazines, in protective plastic envelopes to keep my greasy fingers off the delicate pages. Advertisements from the 40s and 50s--who wouldn't want a new pair of boots for $2.45? French nudie pics--Sarah Bernhardt and Josephine Baker, scantily clad. Art deco and art noveau--and not just the requisite Tournee du Chat Noir, either.

We spent a long while in there, sharing the funniest magazine covers and posters, thumbing through old photographs of people who are long dead or now dying. I saw a photograph of a four year old in a camel colored seventies style suit, and I wondered where he is now. Dead? A father? Passing me by on the street?

We left only when we realized we were famished, odd cravings for clam chowder before our visit to the aquarium.