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The Wilmington Flea Market is very active this weekend. I feel like I am missing out by not being there, strolling the rows of junk vendors. What one buys is not important, it is the act of mingling with the common people that heals boredom. White trash, tattooed biker has-beens with their tattooed, saggy breasted smoking women, who, when they speak, make raspy-voiced quacking sounds, like Donald Duck. They walk their pitbulls or Jack Russell terriers alongside ShiZus on diamond-studded leashes held by prim old money women from New York City. Eyes are drawn down to the locus where the two dogs meet, like a black hole attracting all light, as people place mental bets on whether a dog fight will erupt, and if so, which dog will win. The pitbull tries to mount the diamond-collared ShiZu, and the ShiZu doesn't seem to mind.

An old Russian man in his stall allows a young antiques "expert" to poke a heated needle into the bottom of a faux-ivory Quan Yin statuette, finding out what the rest of us seem to already know, that the material is not ivory but ivory-colored plastic. The young man's formal braggadoccio belies that he is doing this to impress the two girls who accompany him. The rest of us recognize the young man's mating instinct in his actions, and I wonder if he is oblivious to his motives. A whisp of smoke rises from his needle tip.

"What is real?" asks the Russian hawker philosophically. I turn to my daughter, we smile at one another.

"Ivory is real," I say under my breath, "but plastic is not really ivory. I think you know that." I give my daughter five bucks, she buys a tiny rose quartz pendant from the Russian man. The quartz is real, but its silvery cage turns out to be plastic. We laugh, it cost her one dollar. "Unimportant," I say to her, laughing.

The book seller is a delightful stop. His books are not junk, they are not plastic. They are real, they are paper, and paper was once wood from a real tree. The writing is diverse enough to satisfy everyone. Not everybody is interested in antiques. Not everybody is interested in lawn ornaments, or cheap Chinese batteries that are already dead in their unopened packaging, or cheap Chinese razor blades that couldn't cut through jell-o. But, no matter what differences divide the flea market walkers, they all stop at the book seller's stall. I flip through an 1848 edition of Josephus' "JEWISH WARS". It is $25, and I already own a better copy, two in fact, that are older. Still, I have bought books here before.

The book seller is the reason I go to the Wilmington Flea Market. Everything else is ancillary. I also like the incense salesman, and sometimes obscure videos are sold here. I bought a painting once, acrylic on a thin birch bark parchment. I love it, it's a modern folk art style resembling Pennsylvania Dutch Hexes. Four roosters and swirling foliage, something like the Kabbalist's Tree of Life, and it flouresces under blacklight.

The Flea Market isn't a place to buy what is necessary for living, it is a place to feed what is necessary to the soul, a mingling with common people under the blue sky and green hills of summer. I think I will leave shortly.