The Other Side of Markets

Why Grandmere Introduced Me to a Fishmonger 

By Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

When I was a teenager, Grandmere – my grandmother on dad’s side – embarrassed me at stores.  She introduced me to everybody, including a Kroger’s fishmonger named Brad.  

Grandmere was baptized Ella Longendyke in Coxsakie, New York early in the last century.  Her Dutch ancestors settled in the Hudson Valley shortly after the Mayflower.  She married Frederick Herman Edlefsen, a bread salesman born of a Danish baker and a Viennese Catholic Jew.  Go figure.  Frederick died in 1957, leaving Ella a widow.  She worked to put Martin (my Dad) and Dawn (my Aunt) through college.    Though Dutch Reformed, you’d never know it.  Later in life, she often employed her Catholic grandson to mix Bloody Marys before lunch.   

Grandmere was from a different time.  I was a Gen X teenager in a world of electronic check-out counters.  In her world, flesh-and-blood merchants kept everyone one in touch.  You personally knew your butcher, baker, and fishmonger.  To pay for Dad’s and Dawn’s college, she ran a deli, among other jobs.  Of course, she cultivated a good taste in cold cuts and held Jewish delicatessens in high esteem.  It was a neighborly business.   

Per Catholic Social Teaching, commerce is about both prosperity and friendship.  Healthy business promotes love, civilization, and culture.   Markets are social.  We’ve all heard tales of young men and women meeting spouses while working behind counters or waiting tables.  Commerce is a matchmaker and friend-maker.   In Grandmere’s world, neighbors, businesses, friends, and marriages were woven together like a tapestry.  

Catholic Social Teaching calls this the “Common Good.”  It is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, #164).  “Everything is connected” (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 117).   

Some practical advice:  Offer some humor or good words to workers in stores, restaurants, airports, and commercial places.  Be generously patient and gracious when they make inconvenient mistakes.  Restrain selfish tendencies. Patience is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.   Per St. Therese of Lisieux:  Do small things with the greatest love.   Even in marketplaces.  The person behind the counter has a story.   Grandmere introduced me to Brad.  I was embarrassed.  Perhaps she made Brad’s day.  That’s the other side of markets.