Guitarist Steve Uondo Floods Market with Peace.

Lessons of Life I Learned at The Farmers Market

"Don't you let yourself down, inside of you so much you can find, it's not crying time."
Steve Oundo,Singer songwriter

THEY come in early, filtering off the Farmers Highway, Route 2. Some come three across in a box truck carrying boxes.

For their traveling trouble they get an empty lot.

Then comes the Dreamlike Transition. Think bull gang in a Flower Garden.
The call goes out, and it’s “Tents Up”, the race is on, white lined spaces turned to “Eclectic Emporium”, organic anything, everywhere.

Jam jars to tomato towers sit pretty stacked atop red checkered cloths where a table top is full of Colombian Coffees and the whole joint's jumpin, and chock-a-block with fish to flowers.
A little extra, this grayish Saturday, is the first band of the season and the first time up for new music manager Brad Faucher, the guy who gets the gigs.

The pressure's on, with the heavy reins tossed across a wicked friendly trail from Mike Williams, gig getter, lead guitarist, Original 6 Hardy Ponder jazz hound. Faucher also a lead guitarist and point man for a collection of urban bluesmen caught up by R&B called Session 451, fresh from blowing the roof off a hovel, a rocking hideyhole, a redo room for a rain soaked Riverfest hooked on a corner of Margaritas.
On approach this Saturday morning, the Waltham Farmers Market is down a long low tunnel of parking garage, today sprinkled with pink tutus and princesses ,practically headed for someplace else.

On the heels of ballet slippers and rain boots , an elegant echo begins to rise. It bounces between grey columns and up and down scales the words unclear but not the emotion . It’s Earnest. I hear Pleadings, I hear declarations, the voice behind it filling the space , flooding the short ceilings, this space awash in angst, followed up by calm.

At the mouth of the grey garage a solo musician dressed mauve over maroon, holding a shiny ebony Gibson is telling stories of war matched with fingers, six strings full, in a race for peace, always peace. He adds kindness and sharing to children walking for months escaping war. Hope still finds room in this heart, far from his native Uganda. His load felt too heavy, for one man, for this place.

But shared on his six strings, by four rows of chairs, his messaged went out, was delivered, absorbed, stuck like local honey just two stalls down.
Unexpected in these folding chairs, where scallions sat quiet in a back packs beside stalks of rhubarb awaiting strawberries by the new music arranger, who when. seeing our pain, smiles, ,knowing he’s done his job.

“Don't you let yourself down, inside of you so much you can find, it's not crying time."
Steve Oundo