First Monday Trade Days: Ripley Mississippi

My son Caleb and I frequent First Monday Trade Days in Ripley Mississippi. We attend this Redneck Flea Market Extravaganza faithfully. He loves the place. Frankly, there is nothing not to like for an observer of humanity and all things sort of strange and out of the ordinary.

Caleb loves the fact that almost anything under the sun can be had with cash money, and almost every price is negotiable. With cash you can get a duck, a pocket watch, a pit bull dog, some chickens, a hammer, a plum tree, a guinea fowl, a turkey, a dream catcher, an army helmet, a pot-bellied pig, pickled eggs, peanuts, a rabbit, an AR 15, a dog collar, a miniature horse, a llama, a good axe, a beagle, a car jack, fall honey, a game cock, a knife, a ninja sword, any kind of wooden handle, a pistol,  a shotgun, a Rebel flag, a look at a chupacabra for 50 cents, a funnel cake, a velvet Elvis, a snow cone, a Louis L’Amour novel, a set of bras,  a three legged lizard on discount, a socket set, a hamster, an iron pot, and a Mountain Cur puppy. All good stuff, and only a sampling at that.

At First Monday, the stuff is only half the joy. The people are the other half. Mingling in the dusty lanes between the rows and rows of vendor booths the various strata of Southern society rub shoulders looking for a bargain.

Of course, there are more of some strata than others. People missing prominent teeth gather here in great numbers and greet each other with broad grins as if to vie for the honor of having an expanse great enough to spit a watermelon through. We have seen a man whose neck was missing entirely as if someone had used his head as a railroad spike and  driven his neck into his torso. We saw a man with long, thin, flowing gray hair flapping beneath a straw cowboy hat, sporting a thick beard, wearing a wife beater t-shirt, holey jeans and cowboy boots, with an AR rifle slung across his back, leading a gigantic German Shepherd by a length of log chain with one hand and carrying his plastic grocery bag full of who knows what in the other. We’ve seen a woman riding a bicycle wedged so tightly into a tube top that the spillage at both ends jiggled like mashed potato jello causing me to cover Caleb’s eyes and poke myself in both.

 But these are the high-lights, most everybody else is plain and normal. Except for the guns.

A considerable number of folk tote shotguns and rifles about like it was Dodge City, but as Caleb notes we have never seen one violent incident nor one police officer in uniform. I imagine some plain clothes officers mingle in the crowd, but everyone always seems so agreeable that I can't imagine they get much action. 

We do love First Monday. You ought to go some time .