Fish Markets I have Known and Loved

Friends incessantly tease me about my fish market fixations. Weekly I look forward to finding my dinner catch at the local markets. This shopping adventure of My Youth is gone.

On Sunday mornings my Dad and I would buy the family fish dinner at the Indian River Inlet Fish Market.

The shopping promised a delicious dinner and yet the shop itself was a place of horrors.

Trailing clouds of cigar smoke my Dad walked into the shop full of seaweed-y-fresh and ammonia-rancid fish remains. In the case we picked out the whole fresh fish. The fish was scaled, hacked, gored, filleted, wrapped in paper, thrown on a pile of huge ice-cubes all decorated with dashes of the fish blood.

The always cheerful fish monger worked on a butcher block and behind the slop decorated with fish heads and bits of rolling eyes landed on the floor in splashes and canal-rivers. I remember a hose flushed the remains out the store and into the canal. The floor remained painted, stained and highly scented.

I was equally scared and delighted. No need to plead for an evening at Fun Land's House of Horrors!

When I made my adult return to this same store I was again in shock. Delighted as I was to find again the best fish, soft shells and scallops to be bought for 100's of miles around: the House of Fish Horrors was now a classy stainless steel surgical operation.

Beach Blessings,