‘Many things in L.A. don’t feel safe anymore. Here, I don’t have to be looking around.’ : Taking the Time to Enjoy Some of Life’s Simpler Pleasures

Every week, 6-year-old Melody Alarcon and her sister Laura, 9, start bugging their mom in the morning. “Can we go? Can we go tonight?” they cajole.

Yep, mom says. And so with surprisingly large numbers of folks from South Pasadena to Visalia, they converge at the Friday night Monrovia family festival and farmer’s market, one of the few places left in Southern California where 6,000 strangers can share neighborly intimacy.

It’s not just the low prices. (Lettuce, for instance, sells for 50 cents a head.) Nor is it the freshness and the flavor. (If you think an apple is a wax-covered, grainy fruit, you have not bitten into the crisp, juice-dripping apples at Nick Pritchett’s produce stand.)

No, passersby sigh, what makes this little San Gabriel Valley community special on a Friday night is the fragile feeling of small-town America, the way it once was, the way they remember it, when you could walk at night without double-checking that your purse is zippered shut.

At a time when some cities have been forced to invoke evening curfews to avoid violence, Monrovia closes a main thoroughfare to traffic to host the farmers market.

From 5 to 9 p.m., Myrtle Avenue in the Old Town section is transformed into a suburban street festival replete with kiddie rides and crafts vendors, whose wares include hand-knit baby sweaters, carved mobiles, jewelry and assorted kitsch.

The regulars come week after week, meeting friends, browsing the booths, inhaling the wafting smells of sizzling Cajun sausages and hot funnel cakes. It’s the kind of place where vendors offer free strawberries and wedges of watermelon. If you ask about a weird-looking exotic fruit, its seller will probably press it in your hand saying, “Here, try one.”

And in a world that sometimes seems so filled with potential dangers, this is an oasis for children, who roam the closed-off street playing hopscotch over the double-yellow lines dividing the lanes.

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Melody is the Mario Andretti wanna-be of Krazy Kars. With $2 from her mom, Melody has her pick of the miniature battery-powered cars corralled behind a metal fence. Melody gravely selects a red convertible, and pulls sister Laura along. When the older girl protests that she can scarcely fit into the vehicle, Melody pleads: “You know I can’t really drive.”’

So with Laura sitting more out than in the toy car, the two girls putter off in an enclosed area the size of a tiny yard. On the other side of the fence, their mother, Holly Alarcon, a Monrovia artist, sighs. “Melody can’t steer,” she says. “She’ll probably be like this when she’s 16.”

As though on cue, her daughters crash head-on into a barricade, making a loud grating noise as the tiny vehicle pushes the fence along the pavement. The girls dissolve into giggles, switch seats, and crash again.

Holly Alarcon covers her eyes. “I can’t watch.”

Just a few feet away, 5-year-old McKenna Miliei is contemplating her own dilemma: Pony rides? Or the giant air pillow being jumped on by about half a dozen kids?

Breaking into a trot, McKenna yells: “The bouncies!”

Like many who are here tonight, McKenna’s parents, Kelly and Don Miliei of South Pasadena, have incorporated the street festival into their weekly routine.

“We came once and that was it,” said Kelly Miliei. “Many things in L.A. don’t feel safe anymore. Here, I don’t have to be looking around. I don’t have to worry about police protection.”

McKenna and her 4-year-old sister, Rhya, abandon the air cushion in search of better game. Ahh, Pluck-a-Duck. After plunking down 50 cents, McKenna picks a plastic duck floating in a big tub and smiles while she gets her prize, a tiny dinosaur. Rhya is luckier. Her duck yields a pair of hot pink sunglasses. It has a blue paper invitation to a church service attached by a rubber band, which the little girl rips off in her eagerness to try on the glasses.

Their father, a free-lance photographer, tries to explain the powerful draw that the farmer’s market wields over his family.

“The pedestrian gets to have their way,” he said. “Nobody looks over their shoulder crossing the street. It’s an American version of European strolling.”

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Henry Hoeks and his wife, Jeneva, hit several farmer’s markets a week, selling produce for their daughter and her husband, who farm 31 acres in Visalia. The elder couple winters in Arizona.

“We’re people people,” said Jeneva Hoeks. “When we’re tired of being retired, we do this.”

For them, it’s a labor of love, not money. But for Nick Pritchett, a college senior, and Amy Vega, a graduate student, it’s both.

Pritchett and Vega are working their way through school by selling the fruits and vegetables from his father’s 270-acre farm. They go to several daytime markets each week. It’s fast money at the Hermosa Beach farmers market, lots of complaining customers at Torrance, huge crowds at Santa Monica. And the most fun at Monrovia, they say.

“I love the people,” Pritchett says. “It’s low key.”

Pritchett’s tables are loaded with baby potatoes (red and white), onions (red and white) and crunchy apples. The neighboring tables, too, beckon with a cornucopia of Southern California fall harvest: seedless grapes, white corn, radishes, hot peppers and snap peas.

Sandra Marino’s weekly ritual for attending the farmers market includes putting her six pet ducks to bed early while her daughter, Crystal, makes sure their rabbits, Lucky and Midnight, and hamster, Blondie, have snacks.

Tonight, in their quest for dinner, Marino and Crystal pass Pritchett’s and other produce booths, gazing beyond the cinnamon pulls and sticky buns. Crystal, a fourth-grader, craves pizza. Sandra Marino considers a baked potato.

The Marinos, who live in Monrovia, greet their friends, regaling them with animal escapades. And, in matching pink outfits, they just stroll, wrapped arm in arm.

“It’s the atmosphere,” Sandra Marino said. “It’s the family outing.”