Wagon Wheel

My Roommate and I went downtown to the Farmers' Market today.

Just imagine a beautiful sunny day, small white tents, ordered in a conveniently ambulatable cluster in the park blocks - a strip of green in the midst of a moderately-humming small city early afternoon.

Inside the Market,
There are enough trees to guard the little world within the city. I didn't have my camera or I'd post a picture, but build yourself a memory of fresh produce, handcrafted breads and cheese, bottled cooking spice mixes, sunlight coming in warm patches through the trees - neat white tents with congenially chatting perusers walking past, stopping occasionally like bees finding flowers. Put yourself back into that height at which you can barely see over the counter and everything on the other side is a new magic to consider. Add a milling crowd of colors and blended conversation. In the center of it all, make a space for people to sit and eat together, and give them a band to listen to. All acoustic: guitar, mandolin, banjo, violin, stand-up bass and let the singers be middle-aged or older men with mellow smooth-grained wooden voices.

It was after I sent myself off to find a drink to go with our pecan-rosemary bread and blue-veined soft cheese and before I found the little boy selling lemonade for 50c a cup with his father in the open block of grass a few blocks south.

I'd been enjoying the music from the band like an appropriate soundtrack, but suddenly it seemed more familiar. Was it?.. yes. They were playing Wagon Wheel, which my mind has adopted as a CoOp anthem of sorts.

I had to stop and lean on my bike while I listened. And I had to sing along.


Headed down south to the land of the pines
And I'm thumbin' my way into North Caroline
Starin' up the road
And pray to God I see headlights

The scene behind my eyes, halfway through the first verse, was no longer the light and airy arrangement of colors and sounds on a Saturday afternoon, but rather a not-quite-dimly lit kitchen, dark outside the wide wall windows, smelling of after-dinner an island amid college. We sit together, on the floor, on the couch, together with our music. The room is warm with recently-turned-off oven, drying dishes, and the body heat of a shoulder-to-shoulder music circle. Between us, we've got overlapping patches of a bluegrass band: banjo, mandolin, violin, harmonica, our voices, and - oh yes - the washtub bass. We've lived together for months, cooking, cleaning, and working with one another. We have just a little longer to enjoy our time together.


I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin' me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I'm a hopin' for Raleigh
I can see my baby tonight

One of the things I've been considering more is the inevitable physical changes that we move through and that move through us, that separate and limit us in many aspects, but that we each pick up and move with in the course of living.

The time we shared together is over. It is time for the next CoOp to begin their time together. It is time for each of us to move into the lives ahead of us, but every now and then, by chance or careful planning, we find each other. The CoOp is passing to other hands, but we have joined the ranks of CoOp members of Christmas past and present, if you will.

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

I knew the song would have to end.

Richard Dickinson said the reason there was never enough time was so you would choose which things were more important to you. I think good things have to end so you can have time to appreciate them, before, during, and after. .. and so that new and different good things can come along. They all need their time and place, and their ending. To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose...

But, this song always opens up to that previous time and place, where the refrigerator is full of Nancy's Yogurt containers, kitchen is full of company, the potatoes taste like rosemary, I sit closely ringed by friends and family, and our cacophony of voices and strings are bleeding through the windows into the night.

This song, more than anything else I can think of right now, makes me feel home. Wherever I am, hearing it feels home. Many other things make me feel at home or like home or remind me something comforting.


And I gotta get a move on fit for the sun
I hear my baby callin' my name
And I know that she's the only one
And if I die in Raleigh
At least I will die free


As the present began to fade back in around me,
I considered that if I were to die sometime soon, I would like them to play this song at my funeral. Because whatever form I continue in, I will finally be going home.


So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me


The band walked off,
I picked up my memories and put them back into the past,
and continued into a future in which I would buy 2 cups of lemonade from a lemonade stand managed by a little boy and his father.