To the editor:

(Plain Press, December 2013) Perhaps your man had other things on his mind when reporting in the March ’13 issue of the Plain Press this “7 cent solution” to make shopping at the city market easier on the senior crowd and the walking wounded.

Round pegs secured to the fronts of the produce stands will allow shoppers to put up their grocery bags and have both hands to select their cornucopia, and transact the paper and coin. The pegs are the next best thing to shopping carts, an amenity some people in the upper age brackets rely on.

It will boost sales – who’d complain?

A collaboration between the very well-heeled public artists’ studio a few doors north and the city’s under-funded vocational school, could see this people-friendly proposal completed in short order. And it would be a better application of the students’ time and tuition than, what, the faux bird houses they were enlisted to build last fall for that strange art project at 58th and Lorain – a worthless bauble-in-the-air that has already fallen apart (was any pedestrian struck by the wind-borne debris?) while this idea, which will benefit a lot of people, is belittled and goes begging.

After talking with the market’s downtown supervisor and hearing an impressive if odd array of objections (as if we were suggesting a horse and carriage service between the market and RTA’s rail station on the other side of Lorain) – it was, as a last resort, suggested the merchants and customers do the thing themselves and demonstrate that gumption and resolve in which Americans have been known to take pride. It was also suggested a spot on a local TV newscast could generate the materials needed.

Since the market is foremost the story of families and intergenerational continuity, it will be reassuring when our fair city facilitates this common sense accommodation for the elderly who would like to continue to shop there.

We take a lesson from the Shakers and their elegant pegs.

Hayes Rowan

hayesrowan@gmail.com