Suppliers

"Yoo-hoo."

My cellphone whistle sounded, alerting me that I had received a text message.

It was my husband Jim.

"I'm here."

"Come on up," I text-messaged him back.

"Not at your office," he replied. "At the farmers market."

"Oh, hang on."

"Eta?"

"Hang on," I replied. "Someone's in my office, giving me some advice."

"How much money should I give Liza?"

"Wait till I get there."

"Eta?"

"Hold on, I'm en route. I was just negotiating a bergamot deal."

"Bergamot?"

The back story behind this text-messaging exchange is all about the vivid world of a new economy, one that's based less on the commodified notions of late capitalism that have shaped almost every paradigm informing the social relationship of buying and selling goods and more on a twenty-first century understanding of the power of having suppliers and something to exchange.

Now, I realize that the declaration I just made will probably get me into a lot of trouble. Places like the farmers market are capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and based on making profits and dealing with losses through and through. The person in my office giving me advice was a professor of business with a specialization in personal finance. He was delivering his services informally -- meaning without any prior negotiation or discussion -- on the basis of being a colleague and friend whom I had helped out with my writing and editing expertise earlier.  As for the bergamot, it's growing wildly in the backyard of another friend and colleague. She wanted to know what to do with it. I suggested, jokingly, that she give some of it to me. "By all means," she replied. "Come on down, and take as much as you want." I owe this colleague, by the way, a piece of my husband's sourdough starter, but that's a separate story. And, as for Liza, she and her husband Dave raise pigs, goats, and chickens. They helped us get started with our practice of raising chickens two years ago, and we currently are planning a swap of meat birds, post-"processing". Their goats produce an excess of manure, which they gladly give us in exchange for a few hours of extra help a couple times a year when it's time to clean the barn. The money to which Jim was referring was for part of a down payment on a pig that they will raise and have butchered and "processed" into meat that we will then enjoy in the fall and winter.

Economics has never been my strongest or my favorite subject. I took it as a sort of honors class in high school, during which I failed miserably at making money (made-up money) on the stock market but learned for the first time that Karl Marx and communism weren't exactly quite as evil as the Cold War rhetoric of the late 1970s and early 1980s had proclaimed. In fact, to my surprise, Marx actually made a lot of sense. That's probably no surprise when one realizes -- as I came to do so a couple decades later in graduate school -- that Marx's work was really not a blueprint for a communist society as much as it was a critique of capitalism. It was only when capitalism had become the modus operandi of the entire planet, a development that would culminate in the planet's destruction, that communism could flower. Until then, workers would be oppressed and capitalists would control.

These days, in the rural community in which I live, capitalism seems as if it's reached its limit. Restaurants open that nobody can afford and go out of business. Boutique stores peddle useless items that seem to never leave the shelves. And in the meantime scores of people are engaged in what I'll define as practices of great giveaways: Since they can give no money, they give food or time, and accept more or less the same in return.

"We're settled."

I was fishing out a $10 bill to purchase two small basil plants and a pot of parsley as Charles spoke. A third generation farmer, he starts the farmers market season selling seedlings and later berries and tomatoes, and eventually Christmas trees and wreaths before taking a few months off from marketing for the winter.

I handed him the bill.

"Put that away," he said, with a twinkle in his eye. "We're settled."

"No," I protested.

"Yes," he replied. "We always have some extras. It's better to see them planted by people like you who'll help them thrive than try to get them back into the ground ourselves."

I could have protested further, but, as the Borg taught us via Star Trek, resistance in such cases is futile. I thanked him, and my husband -- who rarely restrains his reactions to such impulses of generosity -- hugged him. We went on our way, blessing the existence of a new supplier and plotting how we might not only grow the herbs successfully but pass on our own seedlings of the future to others.