I’ve been looking forward all summer to telling you about my adventures in growing cacahuazintle, the iconic, gigantic Mexican corn used to make pozole, masa and street corn. I’ve been growing it as a horticultural gesture of respect for Mexican culture: some people express their politics with roadside banners. I grow cacahauazintle.

This talk will cover what I have learned — for example, while a cornfield can become a meadow, and a meadow can become a cornfield, it is inefficient to cultivate both at the same time. Yet efficiency isn’t really what I was going for. I was going for a combination of empathy and beauty. This effort has combined astonishing success with hapless failure. I’ll be delving into both, along with sharing what I have learned about cacahuazintle from the perspective of farmers in the southern highlands of Mexico City.

If you’re in these parts (the Northwest Connecticut/Northeast New York border, that is) on Saturday, September 19 at 11 a.m., please swing by Tri-Corner F.E.E.D. in Millerton. It’s a great spot combining nourishment and community.

And if you can’t make it — stay tuned to Homemade Newspaper — I’ll be writing more about this experience soon.

I have to tell someone — so I’m telling you.

A year later, more than a year, Finn Cohen emails to say he wants to talk with me about his favorite songs from 1989.

Absolutely! I’m eager to know the songs of Finn. He’s an editor at The Sun magazine, which has published a bunch of my stuff. For the most recent piece, Finn interviewed me about parenting. I was going to reciprocate by interviewing him about his Top 5 songs from his most formative year of music -- but then Life intervened. Finn explained everything in his email; the upshot being, now he’s ready to talk, and I’m ready to listen.

1. “Enjoy the Silence,” Depeche Mode.

FINN: In the video, the singer is dressed as a king, in a big robe with a collar and a crown. He’s walking with a beach chair in the mountains, in the snow, lip-synching to the song, looking for a place to sit. Hearing this song to this day produces in me a visceral bodily response that makes me feel like how I felt hearing this song when I was 12. I would never turn it off if it came on the radio.

Our convo over Zoom is the first time I have ever seen what Finn looks like. Serious. Round glasses. Goatee. Wearing a tank top and gold chain, a raven tattoo on his shoulder. I feel like I am talking to someone who has survived Act V of Hamlet.

I vow to myself never to turn off any of the songs on Finn’s list. I vow also that I will dress up like a king and carry a chair on a mountain, the better to feel his connection to this song. All this vowing is inside my head. Outside my head, I tell Finn the two songs I would never turn off are “Visions of Johanna” and “That Summer Feeling.”

He receives this information in stillness. Then he tells me a story.

I got stuck in Estonia once, in the capital city, Tallinn. I was studying in St. Petersburg. My visa was entry only, due to a clerical error. I was traveling with friends from my program and not aware of the visa issue until we got to the Russian border. The customs official told me if I came though, I couldn’t leave again. My other option was to go back to Tallinn by myself and wait for the visa problem to get cleared up.

I said “Great!” The dorm in St. Petersburg was gross. This way I could be alone in a European capital. I wandered around for a few days. Tallinn is beautiful but very small. I discovered a Depeche Mode bar. The album Violator that this song comes from has a black cover with red roses. It’s iconic for Depeche Mode fans. I saw a sign with that album cover in front of the bar. The carpet leading into the bar was embroidered with the album cover. I went in there one night and it was not very cool.

The anecdote reverberates in anti-climax. The nothing happening matches the song, which ends with the singer saying “Enjoy the Silence.” Then someone rings a bell. It reverberates. Then after a while there are other sounds which merge with the bells at the beginning of the next song.

2. “Plainsong,” The Cure.

This to me is the purest sound of being 12 years old. It’s very overwrought and melodramatic. It was life-changing and earth-shattering when I first heard it, on a cassette I borrowed from an older kid who had a Walkman and was always listening to music. It took me a long time to work up the courage to ask him. He knew more about music than I did and I wanted to know what he knew. On this song, it’s two and a half minutes before the lyrics even start. There’s no chorus. It’s just one verse, a massive statement.

After listening to almost zero Cure in my life, I have now experienced the thudding crunch of “Plainsong” ten times. More. It feels like diving into the deep end of a pool and suddenly becoming intensely aware of your lungs. A buried voice with tons of reverb keeps repeating, “It’s so cold.” The solemn, stoic guitars from this song accompany me now wherever I go, welling up unexpectedly.

3. “Like a Prayer,” Madonna.

At our wedding, my wife surprised me. She had all of her friends coordinate a dance to this song because she knew how much I liked it.

I watched the video for the first time in 37 years and was shocked by how I had forgotten all about Madonna’s eroticism-is-everything. She’s wearing a negligee and a crucifix while getting it on with a Black saint statue come to life. It’s like, spot the blasphemy.

I think about what Finn said about how Madonna would often present another culture’s musical ideas as her own, but here she is joining in. I wake up in the night with Madonna in my head: “Let the choir sing!”

4. “Love Will Never Do Without You,” Janet Jackson.

There’s such a sense of longing in it. When you’re 12 years old, who does not feel longing? The melody is almost like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It just goes up and down, but it works because the production is so spare and perfect. The producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, they knew how to be clever, how to make a song sing without hitting you over the head with some boring thing.

What gets me the most about Finn picking this song is that I was just talking with my friend Chris about Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. I don’t think I had ever talked with anyone about those guys and here I was talking about them twice in one week. They were producers from Minneapolis who came up at about the same time as Prince. Minneapolis reverberates. I got a Twins cap earlier this year to keep Minneapolis on my mind.

5. (tie) “Debaser,” The Pixies

“Where is My Mind?” was the first Pixies song I ever heard, on the tape that older kid gave me. The first time I heard that song was one of the most significant events in my life, but it’s not from 1989. “Debaser” is. Listening to it now, it sounds kind of dinky, but it was scary to me back then to hear a song sounding that poppy when the lyrics are all about slicing up eyeballs. They’re taking the imagery from a Buñuel film and putting it into a mishmash with a surfy guitar line and that Pixies thing of Black Francis screaming and Kim Deal crooning.

We did two interviews. When Finn called to schedule the second one, I was drumming along to this song in my barn, volume cranked. I didn’t know it was him calling, I just told whoever it was, “Hold on a sec.” It must have felt good for him to know I was cranking his tunes. I liked my drumming, too. I wouldn’t vouch for the technical verisimilitude but I felt happy and in flow.

I asked Finn if he had a visceral bodily response to this song. He said no, but he did to the one that was tied for fifth.

5. (tie) “Achin’ to Be,” The Replacements

This song came out in 1989, but I didn’t hear it until three or four years later. It’s from Don’t Tell a Soul, which is very maligned in the Replacements catalog because it’s so slickly produced. This one just hit me at the right point in my life. I was a pretty unhappy teenager and had a lot of problems that led to it being not a good time for me. This song is about a woman who feels isolated and alone and no one sees her. That encapsulates the moment of starting public school for me. I didn’t go to middle school or elementary school with anyone at this school, so I felt invisible. I still feel that way when I hear it.

What stands out for me in this song is at the beginning of the harmonica break, when the harmonica player is really nailing it, and someone in the background hollers “YEAH!”

I told Finn about the yeah when we had our follow-up. I said, “The yeah is so affirming!” He said he wasn’t even aware of there being a harmonica break – “I may have internalized it to the point where I don’t even notice it.”

“It would be like hearing your kidneys,” I agreed.

“I was listening to it in the peak of being an angry teenager,” Finn replied. “Most of what I was listening to was aggressive guitar music, like Ministry or Nine Inch Nails. That song has a softness to it, and a tenderness.”

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Finn asked if Top 5 was a hard limit. I said there is often treasure in the Honorable Mentions.

Finn had two. One is “So What” by Ministry from their album, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

It’s a very fucked-up song about being a serial killer. That music was eerie and intense, which I was as well in high school. It has this spoken word sample about what creates a psychopath. It was terrifying but also one of the coolest things I ever heard. I was able, even as a kid, to say, I don’t have to adhere to the message of the song. I connected with the anger of it.

His other Honorable Mention is “Woman in Chains” by Tears for Fears. This is a beautiful duet I would have lived my whole life without hearing had Finn not honorably mentioned it.

Tears for Fears were already huge on the basis of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” when they discovered the female vocalist on this track, Oleta Adams, singing in a wine bar. They asked her, “Do you want to be in Tears for Fears?”

I really like knowing that about this band. That they’re so inviting and open to change. I woke up this morning with the last line resounding in my mind: “So free her.” It feels like the thing to do.

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The first thing I did in my new neighborhood in LA is find out where the cork oaks are.

Everywhere, if you know where to look: on Sunset Ave, Penmar, Grand. I rode around on my bike composing photos.

Cork oaks in LA are not magnificent in the way that the banyan figs here are magnificent, like Jupiter in posters of the solar system. Cork oaks are scraggly and I love them. They are where cork comes from. Peel off the spongey bark to keep wine sublime and studios soundproofed. The bark grows back. Useful, resilient, self-sustaining: cork oak.

Grown to benefit the world in Portugal and Spain, cork oaks in LA are street trees, adding texture. I knew where to look thanks to a good-old-fashioned website, TreeKeeper. It tells you the name and location of any street tree in LA and is a miracle of urban planning. Our new LA neighborhood is in Venice, near the Santa Monica border. This is our second downsizing, for when we’re here, part-time, for family. My wife is doing a great job making the new place cozy and she told me to go right ahead when I told her I planned to spend the day galavanting.

After cork oak tourism, I got a good falafel on cushy pita on Ocean Park Blvd. The surfer dude behind the counter saw my paperback and said, “Is that book really called The Idiot? It should be about me.”

Doestoevsky is so great at describing faces. Listen to this: “Her grey eyes might have been at times very merry and caressing, if they had not as a rule looked grave and thoughtful; too much so, especially of late.” Some authors look into the human heart; Doestoevsky looks you right in the face. I wish I could describe surfer dude at the counter like Doestoevsky — “his cheeks were sunburnt and sea-washed as one with not a care, but his eyes sparkled with the glint of self-determination” —ha-ha, sure, now do it for 700 pages!

Point being… after lunch, I meandered on my bike over to the driving range at Rancho Park. I’m taking up golf! Yup, golf, something I’ve been saving ‘til I got old and someone’s turning 65 in two weeks. The top deck at the Rancho Park driving range, that’s like swatting balls from the mezzanine at Shea Stadium. To me, as a non-golfer turned newbie golfer, the game is about the ability to fly. When a swatted ball soars aloft, straight and true: I’m like a bird.

Squibs and shanks don’t matter at a driving range. You just tee up the next ball. The only consquence is learning, and that’s optional.

My companions on this day were lots of people taking lessons. I never want to take a golf lesson, ever. I just want to make it up as I go along. There was also a guy with a Pirates hat — not the classic gold P but a cartoonishly marauding buccaneer — and very shiny shoes.

This guy had a round face and a gap-toothed, trusting, eager smile. He gave the impression of being a well-trained gentleman in his thirties, gaining on his forties. His cap was not a regulation Pirates hat of any kind. It was like fan fiction, a dreamed-up thing. I recognized it at a glance. Before I could process the shoes, he openly admired my knee-high orange socks, which I was wearing for good bicyclist visibility.

“I like your Major League socks. Are you a Mets fan?” he avidly inquired.

I betrayed my innermost self by grumbling, “Not this year.”

“I’m a year away from becoming a licensed baseball historian,” he divulged, skipping right over my apostasy. “My speciality is the 1800’s. The umpires had it bad back then.”

I had questions. How bad did the umps have it in the 1800’s? I’m sure I’ve read about this, but my brainpower was being diverted back to his shoes. Too fancy for golf shoes; or, if they were regulation, then pushing the bounds of snazziness.

We should have aired it all out, me and my new Pirates fan friend. Is there really such a thing as a licensed baseball historian, or did someone make that up to give this guy a goal in life?

I just said, “Baseball in the 1800’s was savage” and skulked away, or attempted to skulk away, but didn’t really know where I was going, and wound up encountering the Bucs fan again, where he greeted me anew: “I like your Major League socks.”

After the driving range, I rode my bike 12 miles to the Central Library to examine different translations of The Idiot. I’ve been reading the Constance Garnett translation. What nuances might I be missing? A librarian with a gaunt mystic’s face half-covered with a black N95 mask retrieved an armful of tomes from the stacks and gave me the run-down on each.

“This is the most recent,” he noted. “This one was published in the U.S.S.R. This one is the Garnett, as revised by Yarmolinsky.”

I thanked him as much as I could without appearing obsequious. Then I sat down and copied out variations of “he was accustomed to appear as a somewhat brilliant young man” — “rather brilliant,” “some brilliance,” “a certain brilliance.” с некоторым блеском (“s nekotorym bleskom”). I got that last bit from Google AI. Credit where credit is due. It was fun to pretend I was writing a thesis on comparative translations but what I really need to do is finish reading The Idiot. Then, I will have accomplished something.

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Coming soon, like, next week — the print edition!

I have been crafting some specialty items for Homemade Newspaper readers — and my mom, the artist Dee Gozonsky — has made something great. Let’s start with her!

This is my mom’s vision of the psychological deer fence protecting the cacahuazintle, which I’m thrilled to say is coming up nicely.

You can get a print of my mom’s lovely watercolor-and-ink drawing, as well as a hold-it-in-your-hands edition of Homemade Newspaper,

by becoming a paid subscriber.

And if you would like a 9-inch vinyl record mounted on a block of wood — we can make that happen, too.

I still have half a pound of cacahuazintle corn seed left over, if anyone wants to try this experiment with me.

The experiment is to grow Mexican and Central American foodstuffs in Northwest Connecticut. The goal is solidarity.

I’m also planning on growing tomatillos, cilantro, chile de arbol, and pumpkins that are good for making pepitas.

Plus dia de los muertos marigolds.

It may be that deer will devour everything. We are defined by the risks we take. Tomatillos and cilantro grew great last summer, so I’m hopeful. I am also interested in discovering ways to express solidarity that are not just symbolic. One idea is to read Pedro Páramo in Spanish. I’m open to other ideas.

The reason I have half a pound of seed left is that I was over-optimistic. I did not know that cacahuazintle corn stalks get gigantic, which is exciting but also why you can’t grow that many. I did not in fact know a thing about cacahuazintle until I searched online what type of corn is used to make pozole. I love pozole.

I hope to donate everything to the F.E.E.D. Market in Millerton, so people from Mexico and Central America who live around here can see fresh produce that reminds them of home. It might be more like a glimpse. If I raise a dozen ears, that’ll be a bumper crop. This is a demonstration garden.

I started by dreaming about doing this in my soul all winter long. Then, the moment it turned mid-May, I weed-whacked four zig-zagged square-yard plots, chopping down where there was mostly fleabane and garlic mustard, leaving multitudes of wild aster, raspberry and sedge.

Then I put cardboard down to suppress weeds; cut staggered x’s in each block with a pocket knife to mark the planting spots; soaked the cardboard to get it started on decomposing; drew a line in red Sharpie an inch and a half from the tips of a lilac stick to use as a depth guide, stuck the stick in the X, and planted two chunky seeds.

Tomorrow I might harvest birch bark from fallen branches in the woods, to serve as cuffs to guard the seedlings when they sprout. I might also make a new psychological deer fence, which is when you drape birch bark on twine around a garden to make deer think that’s a thick birch thicket so don’t even bother grazing over there. I tried this method two years ago and it worked well enough to get a sassafrass tree established!

Whatever happens, I planted exactly 24 seeds, which leaves quite a few hundred left over. So if you are up for cultivating experimental Mexican solidarity corn, hit me up and we’ll make it happen.

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P.S. If you are in the Northwest Corner this weekend and are wondering what to grow alongside your new crop of cacahuizantle corn, check out the homegrown plant sale at the David M. Hunt library in Falls Village.

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Some people like to hang banners with slogans by the roadside. Driving my wife to the airport a couple days ago, we saw two types of yard signs: Vote NO on the Budget and Vote YES on the Budget.

A third option, and the one I like in terms of making my feelings known, is roadside re-planting of native species to replace invasives. I have been putting a hurt on invasives with the circular saw blade on my brush cutter this early spring, but what’s gonna grow back if not more honeysuckle, multiflora, burning bush, barberry, the whole gang.

Well how about pussy willow? How ‘bout elderberry? All we are saying is give red osier dogwood a chance. The beautiful thing is you can straight-stick all of these native plants; meaning, cut off a foot-long, half-inch-thick branch just below a new-leaf node. Just go ahead and straight-stick that cutting a few inches into the ground.

And there you have it. Replanting with natives. I have taken things a step further by digging up a small chokecherry from the forest behind my house. This was exciting because the word chokecherry is itself a poem in honor of National Poetry Month, and because this plant offers so much ecological benefit: nectar, berries, nesting. Chokecherry also grows in thickets, suppressing invasives.

What a big win-win — until I read the Connecticut Botanical Society’s warning on relocating woodland plants. It really couldn’t be clearer. Don’t do it. Ooops.

Well, it was just that one. I promise not to do it again — even though there are so many little chokecherries in the forest on my property. I might be doing them a favor by thinning them out? The next time I talk to a forester, I’ll ask. Meanwhile I am also planting flowers roadside. I just broadcast borage in front of an old log where wineberry had taken over but not any more. Borage flowers a deep blue, black-centered star. It’ll look beautiful against that log.

Too bad about wineberry, though. I love wineberries. Their light fresh taste! Straight off the vine, foraging, what it feels like to be a bear. I was so sad when I found out they’re invasive, but when you look at their raspy vines literally staking out territory here in early spring, it’s like — all right already. My sense is that all the wineberries I’m chopping down will grow back by midsummer, which is fine. Let them grow in place, just not all over the place.

Today is a new day of roadside replanting. I’m going to plant legit nursery-bought eastern Redbud, witch hazel, and buttonbush close to the road, and scarlet poppies next to a big mossy rock. I wave to my neighbors when they drive by. They wave back. That’s a good sign.

And now another poem in further honor of National Poetry Month.

I’m Sorry I Killed You

I’m sorry I killed you
Chayote squash
I was gonna build you a house
	out of old windows
	so your vines would feel heat and 
						you would spread and prosper.

I would have painted over
the old lead paint
	first with primer
	then two coats
	so your greenhouse would be food grade and
		I could in late summer 
		donate pale green baseball-heft squash
		to the Tri-Corner F.E.E.D. Market
		as my way of saying Hey!
		to Mexican & Central American folks
		who live around here.

But instead I killed you.
					Frost exposure.
I thought I was hardening you
inside the cold frame
which I made from an old window
with lots of help from my friend Steve – 
			
				Hey, Steve!

	but no
	it was too cold and
	your formerly exuberant vine

drooped.

I miss you.
I’m sorry I killed you. I don’t think this climate was right for you but I’m glad we tried.
I am still planning to grow
	Cacahuazintle corn, tomatillos, pumpkins for pepitas, green beans, and
                                                         epazote.

		

Taking stock of the Post-It’s scattered across my desk, the note-to-self repeating over and over is Play in the Mud.

So I did. It was squishy, slurpy fun. I have these unbeatable waterproof boots my wife got me and for which I thank her every time I pull them up to the middle of my shins. Pair waterproof boots with rainpants and I am fearless about getting wet. Out I tromped into the start of Mud Season in my beloved Northwest Corner of Connecticut.

Playing in mud happened quick. It was not a full-body, whole-hog immersion, more like a sloshing jig. The snowmelt and ground haven’t quite congealed yet. More mud is yet to come. Right now, the drab dead brown bare ground is still glamorous by virtue of not being buried under snow. Meanwhile the snow has for the time being transubstantiated into merrily running streams, conjuring happy thoughts of essence and revival.

My more lasting experience of mud was not play but work.

I dug a circle in the unfrozen ground around a box elder in the in-transition garden. When it was a bramble of bittersweet, two summers ago, I saw the tip of this box elder emerging like the hand of a drowning sailor. I rushed to the rescue with a pair of hedge clippers, crawling on my belly, chop-chop-chopping. What a feeling of being on the right side of history to see that box elder emerge and to uncover as a bonus the nearby hickory, dogwood, and spicebush. That was yardwork I could stand back from with hands on hips and think Yes — even as uneasy recognition set in that I had been crawling around in poison ivy. Still, totally worth it and I’d do it again.

But then I started reading up on box elder. They are not prized. A messy tree, that’s the rap. Bummer! This is a tree I sat outside and drew with colored pencils this time last year. The swelling buds. The tapered lines. We were in love.

Which is why I’m not just chopping the box elder down. I’m gonna transplant ki across the road, next to the big mossy rock. I’ll be able to see ki from my desk. “Ki” is the pronoun suggested by Robin Wall Kimmerer for referring to living beings, instead of “it.” Makes sense to me.

Digging with the extra-long blade of a trench spade in a circle below the crown of the box elder cut the spreading roots. This was not easy. The roots were like, hey, we’re in here! I had to shovel hard. Then pulling the spade back out was like the sword in the stone. I stood back and panted. It’s weird to get hot when it’s cold. Yes it was work but all winter long in Los Angeles I had circled in the calendar of my mind the day when I came back to Connecticut and transplanted that box elder as an act of natural love.

The roots will have all spring and summer to grow back into a tighter root ball. Then I’ll do the transplanting in November when ki is dormant again. You can’t make all these changes in one sudden moment, snap your fingers and it’s done.

I’m gonna move the hickory, too. Ki will be in a better place on the north side of the garden, leaving the southern exposure open for Black-eyed Susan and wild bergamot.

Sit around and be resentful about not being in Connecticut amidst my beloved forest & new friends, even as winter set in, because I want to be there for Connecticut in winter

OR

have fun in LA.

I chose fun: playing tennis, writing, hanging out with my wife, reading, loafing, riding public transit, and one of the most fun things of all — playing music with my friend and neighbor Jim.

There I was walking up our sidewalk to tack a flyer on the local library bulletin board for my latest pop-up bookclub, this one for How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy — when I met Jim tending his front yard garden.

He said, “We should play together!”

These are the sweetest words anyone can ever say to me, and he said them out of purest kismet. I hadn’t said anything about playing yet. Jim just knew.

I said Yes, Let’s. What I really meant was thank you thank you thank you. I had been putting those flyers up all over for weeks and not getting any bites.

I was nonetheless reading How to Write One Song and doing what it said. Free associating. Making lists of phrases that spoke to me from my daily jottings, cutting them up into little pieces,

     morning chuckle, hippie freedom
     genie lantern, mushroom lamp
     bubble punctured by a cat

putting the pieces into a paper bag, pulling them out one by one, seeing if that made a song.

Nope.

None of the exercises generated anything like the song I thought I would write if I wrote songs. This song would be like “I Am a Rock” by Simon & Garfunkel and also like a Pavement song I’ve never even heard of, but the Pavement influence would be in there.

Nothing like that materialized, but I did take the baby step of considering the possibility of writing a song, which previously had felt like something I would by no means ever do, like ski jumping.

Now I was jotting down phrases like “I’m walking in my underwear.” That could be a song. It could be a good song. I haven’t written it yet, though.

The song that did come out is a complete surprise. I had no idea it was in me, but it is true and real. And having written and sung it, I feel fresh and new.

I owe this good feeling to Jim.

I have learned more from him than I consciously know. It’s that kind of thing where you realize years later that the reason you’re doing something well is because of the person who taught you.

One thing I do realize I got from Jim is the importance of starting with a steady beat. I had always known unsteadiness was a fundamental flaw in my drumming. Yes it expressed joy. But was it on the beat?

Nyet, nyet, triple-nyet. My drumming was all over the place. Jim said, let’s get a simple beat down and take it from there. When he put it that way, it finally sank in, and I started practicing much more with a metronome.

Jim also taught me the musical value of not playing at all. This was to gently correct my tendency to overdrum. For this lesson, he told me a story about his brother. His brother once asked him the musical question, “When the left fielder backs up a ground ball cleanly fielded by the third baseman, is he still playing?”

Ah. That made sense.

I further admired Jim’s being open-minded and serious about all my flights of fancy, starting from when I proposed to make up for my lack of a drum kit by banging on a bike stand. He also encouraged my harmonica playing.

I love Jim. He has a strict aesthetic about how many raven calls to include on any song. That number is one.

At the session where we made this song, which I call “Our Street Song,” I totally intended for the beat to be on 2 and 4, 2 and 4, 2 and 4, 2 and 4. But sometimes I get nervous. Also, the DAW I record this stuff on is tricky! It is like riding a mechanical bull. This is why despite my practicing to a metronome, the beat still wanders all over the place, re-enacting my meandering along our sidewalk, taking pictures of our pretty street.

And yet Jim navigated though my unbeat, picking his way into a beautiful groove that reminds me of the soaring mandolins on “Maggie May” and all those other great songs on Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart.

After laying down all this luscious guitar. Jim said, “We should have some vocals to put on top of that.” I said I have lyrics! I had written down doggerel about every plant I took a picture of. It is the silliest stuff you could imagine. That’s what I sang. I don’t hear Paul Simon or Pavement in there. I hear my heart.

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OTHER HOMEMADE NEWS

People!

I have this story coming out in

Citric Acid

about my latest quest —

visiting every botanical garden in Orange County, mainly by public transit.

This story is lush with splendor, what Mark Twain would write if he wrote like me.

My wife… is a subscriber …

What? No one said anything about rain. Snow, yes; snow everywhere except LA. I really wished I could have been there in Connecticut for 22 inches of snow, but no, my role is to be here in LA basking in the sunshine. I was down to bask but now what’s this? Rain?

What can I do now? It’s a question a lot of people are asking and not just about the weather, but let’s stay on topic. I decided to go for walk. Mail a letter, pick up a prescription. One foot in front of the other.

This soon led to renewed appreciation of the beauty of my neighborhood. You are beautiful. You are beautiful. You are beautiful, too. That’s what I think and feel about the trees and flowers when I walk around my neighborhood in Mar Vista between Culver City and Venice.

I also feel love for landmarks that are not exquisite architecture but are like stalagmites of every time I’ve ever waited for a bus or gone to the library or farmer’s market here. The Yum-Yum Donuts sign, so purple. The Bryan Hawkins Ken-Po Karate sign: there’s just something heart-ache-y in a good way about its grandiosity, its bound-to-fall-ness. That sign is our local Ozymandias.

Speaking of ruins, I love the dilapidated payphones of my neighborhood. No one is ever going to call anyone from those phones again, yet there they still are. Who doesn’t love a post-industrial ruin? I take heart nowadays in all things this too shall pass.

I was digging the clip clop of my walking pace. My daughter Lilly recently turned me on to the music of Ella Jenkins, who does a song for kids called “Different Rhythms.” She lists all kinds of things that are rhythm: the farmer hoeing a field, the wave crashing on the shore. Walking is a rhythm, Ella Jenkins sang so clearly a child could understand. Her song stayed with me as I clip-clopped along to the pillbox percussion in my front pocket after I picked up my prescription.

I wondered if my sister Anne, a great North Jersey keyboardist and piano teacher, might like to lay down some long-distance piano to accompany my pictures from this stroll. Very happily she did, as you can hear in the walking blues so jauntily accompanying the video.

Clip-clop, clip-clop like a goat in some other children’s song, I clambered up Grand View taking pictures of everything beautiful. This was a lot. Highlights include a rusty proud old Ford truck, and a dragon tree juxtaposed with red powderpuff, yes, you heard that right, powderpuff, Calliandra haematocephala.

The sign at St. Bede’s — “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God” — really resonated with me. That’s why I added the clang of the lid I bought the other day at the National Council of Jewish Women thrift store on Venice, on the happy intuition that I would soon be needing a pot lid to clang.

The snow family basking at the end is me sending love to everyone out there in the cold.

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This all came about courtside at Ladera Park. I was pursuing my hobby of trying to guess what band is playing the funky song Chris has going on his boombox. “Everytime I turn around I’m back in love again” — is that Grover Washington? Chris was like, please. Is it Con Funk Shun? That’s a better quality guess, he said, and allowed a clue: the band’s name is an acronym.

Oh in that case I have no idea, I confessed, so he told me, L.T.D. Of course! This led us into a discussion of how obsessed he is with his new synthesizer and how hours pass like seconds while he is getting the sustain just right. Same-same-same I confirmed, regarding my own full-psyche immersions into multi-tracking percussion I find by banging on things in the street.

Send me something, Chris said, and I pounced at the opportunity, which you can hear on this track as me pounding a big round plastic stability ball with a baseball bat. It was a privilege and honor to see Chris and Jack take it from there into this swirling chunky minute of delight.

Let’s start with the tree across the street. That elm tree is out-of-control scraggly, with twigs and sticks like the too-many thoughts of an insomniac. Ki’s in need of pruning that will not be happening, and so must be appreciated as reality.

Same with this piece of plastic disposable dental floss, sitting for months at the foot of a jacaranda down the street. Every time I see it, walking to the bus stop or library, I think Ugh. Today, though, I just appreciate being able to see it.

The reason I am in such an appreciative mood today is I heard this week that my tennis friend Desmond died. Just like that. Big strong guy. Solid. Friendly. Not a person I thought would die. We won a match together at sectionals twelve years ago, and so me and Desmond are bonded together forever in sporting triumph.

The last time I saw him on a court, we shit-talked.

“When did you get good?” I asked him.

“I’ve always been good,” he replied. “When did you put on so much weight?”

Those are not great parting words but they are reality. I started another conversation with Desmond in my heart during my tree appreciation walk. For example, when I saw the arbutus thriving outside the library. Ki replaced a tree that years ago was there one day, gone the next. The absence was shocking. This arbutus is beautiful now but I still remember the shock of the tree that used to be here being gone.

Later, I saw a downed silver elm. It has been raining hard and sometimes it’s too much. You expect some trees to fall but this beautiful tree was right in front of someone’s house. Half of ki is still there though, like Dyonne, Desmond’s warm strong friendly tennis-loving widow.

During this walk, I was listening to a playlist of my favorite songs from 2025, but something was going wrong and the songs kept ending too soon. So I took out my earbuds and listened to the steady rain. I saw bright lingering Christmas lights reflected on the sidewalks and watched water rushing curbside. I saw a Norfolk Island pine standing tall, solid, and splendid of branch.

A few years ago, I was searching all over Los Angeles for toyon. I was writing a story about trees to love in LA and people kept telling me toyon, toyon, which I had never heard of before. But I couldn’t find toyon anywhere. I rode my bike up and down the North Valley Riverwalk in Studio City, searching everywhere for toyon, fruitlessly. I had to give up. Today, not even trying, I found toyon in abundance.

The beautiful Los Angeles trees on this rainy last day of the year made me think not only of Desmond but also of trees I loved all year long in Connecticut. The baby ash trees growing up alongside countless other young maples, oaks, hickories, basswood, pine. The wild apple trees. The tamararacks of gold, shimmering in the swamp, undisturbed, the picture of peace. At first I thought I would only see tamaracks in the swamp but after I learned to recognize them, I saw tamaracks everywhere.

I commemorated my most recent finishing of Moby-Dick on a dune at Ocean Beach at the western edge of San Francisco, beyond the Golden Gate, next stop Pacific Ocean. That’s where it happens, the ultra-climax of this novel that never ends.

To commemorate this third or fourth Moby-Dick reading of my lifetime, I turned on the beach to the chapter titled “The Pacific,” and found Ishmael looking my way. From the other side of the ocean and 180 years ago, he remarks how the same waves he contemplates from the Bashee isles also wash “new-built California towns” and make “all coasts one bay.”

That was really transportive. I took solace in the novel’s universal embrace on this morning after two more mass shootings. Later in the day, Peter Orner, teacher of this great Community of Writers course I’ve been taking on the book, would start off our last class, “There’s a lot going on in the world and I’m glad to be here.”

I’ve been thinking about his eloquent simplicity, and it makes me want to say a little more. Moby-Dick is suited to public mourning. A paragraph before Ishmael looks out towards California, he dwells upon the dead at sea:

And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter’s Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Melville gives us so many gifts of solace in this sentence, starting with the first word, “And.” Sentences that start with And suggest radical continuity. The next word, “meet,” was already archaic in 1850, a holdover from the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible. Here, the old-fashioned way of saying “fitting and proper” connects Ishmael’s reflections to those sacred texts.

Then we get into the oceanic rhythm of the prose, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing through sounds infinitely rich. Millions of mixed. Shades and shadows. Behold this rare pearl of a word — somnambulisms. Bask in the reverie of dreaming, dreaming. All of this beautiful truth as prose cresting to the metaphor of ever-rolling waves generated by the spirits of the drowned.

Moby-Dick is made of coping with grief. Ishmael’s story is an elegy for his shipmates and the redemption of his survival. On page one, he fends off suicidal survivor’s guilt by committing to tell the tale. Off he goes to whaling towns, paying his respects at chapels with terse, heartbreaking memorials to sailors lost at sea. It is not just human grief Melville registers. He feels deeply for the hunted whales, their dying heads “turning sunwards.” Ahab’s head turns sunward often, too. I could tell I was under this book’s spell because of how often I thought about it when I looked at the sun.

Before the Pequod is fully under sail, Ishamael eulogizes one sailor who stands for all:

Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

I took some notes on the many smart and/or arguable things people in this class I’ve been taking said. This one guy, Michael, said something to the effect of, this book teaches us how to read it. At first I thought, does it really? Because, you really do have to will yourself through long, long chapters about ropes and whale skulls to feel what I felt reading on the beach, looking out at the ocean Melville describes as “the tide-beating heart of earth.”

It really does help a lot to read this with other people because that’s what gets you through the hard parts. Also, I have come to realize that Michael was exactly right. “Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing - straight up, leaps thy apotheosis” is how the redemptive power of Moby-Dick works.

You read through this amazing, stultefying, amazing, stultefying book, all 820 pages. On page 819 you know everything there is to know about whaling. You have entered the mind of God on this topic. And then, on page 820, it’s gone. Not only gone, but as if it never was. Nothing ends so completely as the ending of Moby-Dick.

Until you pick the book back up, maybe right away, maybe years later, maybe both, maybe life is just what we do while we’re reading Moby-Dick. Here it is, the universe once again unfolding, different each time, but always with generations of devout readers as companions, an epic Kaddish for reading and carrying on together.

I was gonna leave my chainsaw chain stuck in the stump of a buckthorn, like a harpoon in the flank of Moby Dick. It would be not a surrender to invasives but an acknowledgement that there are a LOT of them and only one of me. A small sacrifice, much better to leave behind than a finger or trail of blood.

I do feel very fortunate to be emerging from the woods unscathed at the end of my rookie season of wielding a chainsaw. But then I thought fork no! I don’t want a hunter coming across my rusting chain and snort, “The guy from Los Angeles came a cropper.”

I want the hunters to appreciate the acreage of invasives I’ve knocked out over the past nine months, the way I appreciate them keeping deer from nibbling my sassafrass and pumpkins. The rusting chain stuck in the thorny tree would visit me over the winter in my California dreams, declaring, “Look who has dominion over whom.”

So to protect my winter sleep and keep it cool with the hunters and show the buckthorn what’s up, I got out my handsaw one more time and hacked away, both hands, here we go. That thing was stuck in there pretty good. It was not my most sagaciously angled cut of all time. It got stuck for a reason. But finishing off where I began early last spring, before I ever got a chainsaw, when I was doing battle with invasives by hand — that worked. I rescued the chain, brought it back into the barn and hung it up on a nail to be sharpened next March.

Meanwhile, it’s time to head back to LA for the winter. Farewell, Connecticut. Fondest possible farewell. I love being here among the trees and talking about mulch and books and rivers and music with all my nutmeg friends. I feel sad to be leaving but what about my friends and family in LA? What about warmth as in from sunshine during winter? Also what about not completely abandoning your adopted hometown when the going is tough?

Right on to all of that. I am looking forward to riding my bike and taking public transit to play tennis again, and also see if I can start a new band. I’m thinking maybe a Breeders cover band? Or even more daring, get a copy of Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song and see who wants to mix it up on originals.

I’m really psyched about that. I am also looking forward to coming back here pronto. I’ve got all kinds of cool projects waiting. Teaching poetry once a week to middle schoolers. I really wanna see how they like Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. I also think it’ll be interesting to come up with poems pre-to-early teens would like, along the lines of the ones anthologized by Kenneth Koch in his great how-to-teach-poetry books, but updated to include poets from nowadays.

I have other secret goals that I am still tinkering with in the smithy of my soul, but let me tell you about this last one. I dropped off some sugar pumpkins at the food pantry in Millerton and they said that’s great, people will be happy. They’re so welcoming at the food pantry in Millerton. They said, hey, didn’t you drop off tomatillos earlier this year. I said yup.

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What farm are you with? they asked. These are just from my backyard, I said. We got to talking and it turns out that next year I can plan to farm produce that they actually need. The tomatillos were a hit. They always need cilantro and cilantro went nuts in my garden this year. You know what I bet would be a huge smash?

Chayote squash.

A huge heck yeah written across the sky: that’s how I feel about the prospect of farming cilantro, tomatillos, chayote squash and whatever else the people want and need when I get back to Connecticut next spring. I also have a name for my farm. I will call it Freelance Farm.

First, we gotta play Game 7 to find out who wins the World Series. This is what I always say about every game. You gotta play the game to find out. How other than by playing Game 6 would you know that the otherwise game-tieing hit, almost certainly leading to the Blue Jays walk-off triumph, instead gets wedged in the fence. To be followed by an almost no-percent of happening, game-ending line-out double-play.

But those things did happen and no matter what happens in Game 7, they are a great start on hope springing eternal. Who knows what will happen? This is my solace when living through what often feels like a dark period of history. You gotta play the games to find out.

So will the Dodgers unclench and let their talent sing? Will the Blue Jay’s last-to-first, Oh Canada vibe prevail? We are soon to have found out. And then what?

Here comes late autumn, almost all the maple leaves gone but the poplars and oaks extending their exquisite benediction. My mom was just visiting up here in Connecticut saying that bare trees are nature’s sculpture. That really changed my mindset from no-no-no-no, I don’t want this to be over, to: okay — bring it on.

“It” being, things to do when there’s no baseball. Songwriting, maybe. I am thinking about reverse-engineering some of my favorite songs and have, in fact, already started with Townes Van Zandt's “To Live is To Fly.” It’s a kitchen-sink goodbye song. He says all sorts of things, just lets it all out as it comes, but sometimes with jewel-like rhymes. My favorite part is when he says, “I’ll miss the system here / The bottom’s low and the treble’s clear.” He’s saying goodbye to the PA system at a club.

Surprising!

Next up is “My Old School” by Steely Dan because of this one great line that opens the second stanza: “Oleander.” That’s it. Just “Oleander.” There’s lots of storytelling in that song and they say stuff after “Oleander” — it’s growing outside a free-spirited college student’s dorm room — but the convoluted story is untold. What stays with us for decades is the precise imagery and phrasing (and Hall of Fame cowbell). Can you imagine what it would be like to start a stanza so perfectly?

I really can’t, but I’m game to try. Just like I’m game to wade through all these pain-in-the-brain commercials just to see if Teo Hernández can hold off on swinging at that way-outside third strike. I swung at many a way-outside third strike in my Sunday League career, and never once did I do it on purpose. I feel for him. But still, I’m like: Teo! C’mon!

I’ll miss having baseball players’ failures to bemoan and their successes to cheer. You shoulda heard me when Miguel Rojas caught that throw from Kiké Hernández. I didn’t even know I had it in me. I’m a Mets fan, born within a few miles of then under-construction Shea Stadium. I’d be fine with the Blue Jays winning because my friends who are Blue Jays fans are beautiful people and Canada is a beautiful country. But deep down inside there is a Dodger fan who bellows with pleasure when they win.

Bellowing with pleasure is good, and having lived in Los Angeles for most of my adulthood and seen far more Dodger games live than any other team, I hope LA prevails. Either way, on the afternoon of Game 7, I am glad to have swatted a slightly rotting pumpkin with a big ol’ bittersweet vine back into the patch where it came from, potentially to overwinter and grow into new fresh beautiful pumpkin vines. What you see in this video is my first swing of the season, coming off the bench just in time to position myself for a productive off-season — and I wish the same + more to you.

Howdy!

Ultra-last minute, I know, but now is always my favorite time — so please consider this invitation to join me and 100 other smart + caring people from all over the world in reading Moby-Dick together, starting… right now.

[ SIGN ME UP RIGHT NOW, THAT’S ALL I NEED TO HEAR ]

What this is:

Six online interactive lectures, Sundays 7-10 Eastern for full-brain, whole-heart immersion in Moby-Dick, with me as your TA to a class led by Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott and presented by Community of Writers. We set sail TODAY at 7 Eastern and the voyage continues Sundays through November 23. I will also be sharing dispatches during the week — including at least one visit to Melville’s house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is right up the road from me, a cheerful and stately yellow home still open for everyone to experience.

[ SIGN ME UP RIGHT NOW, I just can’t wait to live chat with you standing out in the field next to Melville’s study, where his ocean-sized wooden desk looks out through the window over that field to a hill that looks just like a whale. ]

Hearken ye, this is gonna be a mind-blower. The Great American Wild Ride featuring thee all-time outsider, Mr. Call Me Ishmael, testing his mettle when faced with a merciless all-powerful leader hell-bent on revenge. Melville wrote the whole thing in one year, 1851, ten years before our predecessors as citizens of the United States began the Civil War.

If you just said, wow, that is totally Ripped from the Headlines! — then this might be a great Sunday thing for you and possibly even for others among your more literary-obsessive friends, the ones for whom it is not all just a game.

If you ever thought it would be swell to drop EVERYTHING and begin obsessively reading Moby-Dick and talking about it with me and Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott and 100+ new potential new book friends in Sierra Nevadas-based and world-beloved Community of Writers (right back at you, world) — or, if you really love getting into the knotty prose of a visionary compulsive — if you love sailor humor — if you love fantastic friendships that completely transcend Fear of the Other — if you love salty New England towns or inside Bible jokes— if you love Herman Melville for his beard, or for his deep friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne — if you love knowing everything there is to know as of 1851 about whales and whaling — if you love wondering what it all means, everything, everything— then maybe this is the perfect spur of the moment invitation to read and talk about Moby-Dick starting right now and ongoing Sundays until the week before Thanksgiving.

And then one more bonus meeting on that Tuesday before Thanksgiving because you are gonna want to have an instant reunion with all your epic friends.

I send this invitation to you with an ocean of love,

Mark

PS As my special gift to you for reading this far, please consider this Smithsonian Institute article about whales who were alive before Melville wrote Moby-Dick and are still alive today.

I’m so happy about completing my path through the edge of the forest.

This has been an all-summer-long project, extending into the prime of mid-autumn, this beautiful morning of first frost. All night last night I didn’t even care about sleeping because I was so excited about being able to spray paint a blue dot on trees to show the way.

The starting dot is on a sugar maple twenty times taller than I am, in among many, many other maples I can’t see the top of, across the street from a lingering ash. Oh, it’s sad about almost all the ash trees being dead and also very don’t-give-up-hope-completely that this particular tree is still not only hanging in there but holding its own. I noticed it one afternoon when I was out for a walk with my granddaughter in her stroller. We both looked up and there it was, an ash tree that qualifies as a local miracle.

You would not believe how many invasives I have vanquished from these woods. So much bittersweet that used to thrash around like a pit of vipers is gone, gone, gone. You don’t look over at the edge of the woods anymore and think ugh, so much bittersweet. You think, wow, what’s in those woods?

I can tell you! Allegheny blackberry. Lots of baby oak trees. So much periwinkle. Ample stands of maple leaf viburnum, one of my favorite new plants of the year. I just like the poetic-sounding name.

I have discovered so many terrific plants in the woods. A tulip tree. An apple tree! — two of them — growing wild. When I think about those wild apple trees, I feel this sense of Trust in Life. I also like having cleared one big flat rock so I can lay on it in the sunshine — one of the very best things a living being can do is lay on a rock in the sun — and look up at the canopy of maple leaves.

Yes it is true that there are still many, many invasives yet to be yanked out of the forest. Multi-flora rose, which is like the alien in Alien, when it gets on your back and neck with its nasty thorns, what a living nightmare — but you just have to stay calm and keep snipping. So far this year I am very, very thankful to have avoided injury, self-inflicted or otherwise. I want to register my gratitude for this, hopefully without incurring any jinxes. I really appreciate the Game of Logging class I took through Great Mountain Forest for instilling a proper fear of chainsaws and habits of chainsaw safety. Also I would like to give a shout-out to the Sawyer brand of tick repellants.

I love being in the woods with snags and stumps and dead logs, knowing that all these defunct trees carry on vital roles for forest health even after they are individually dead. Talk about hopeful!

I love hearing the one bird call I learned to identify this year: blue jays. They caw and caw, agressively, like a bird grunt. It is not beautiful but I do love being able to register: blue jay. I am also happy about being able to identify periwinkle as ground cover. My hope for next year is to know more bird calls and more about ground cover as well as the soil below. But for now and forever I am delighted to have made a path through the edge of the woods.

This was our third and most transcendent yet rehearsal of our nascent Stereolab cover band, which puts it way up there, as the first two get-togethers were exhilarating and life-affirming. Such is the joy!

What made it extra sublime this time was the two-note synth loop I coaxed out of my old laptop, seen here propped up with a boombox on logs fresh cut from the forest behind the barn where we not only play but cavort.

Thanks to my wife for the vivid videography!

All we really need now are some lilting off-kilter French vocalists, as well as who-knows-what-other X factors of delight. Then we will be ready to transcend further still, to the next stage, bandstand or kiosk. We’re open to anyone — experience, talent, don’t worry! — who’s either up to jam in and around the northwest corner of Connecticut or else takes a free-form approach to geography & collaboration. If that sounds like you, holler!

I wasn’t even gonna watch the 162nd and decisive game. “It’s gonna be a catastrophe,” I assured my wife. To my nephew, I predicted, “They’re gonna score one run early on catcher’s interference with the bases loaded, then go on to lose 2-1 even after knowing the Reds have lost.”

They had to win and the Reds had to lose, you see, in order for the 2025 Mets to make the playoffs. That’s a bad situation to be in, not just for a baseball team but for a fan who likes to draw life lessons from baseball. You have to lose in order for me to win: that’s not a perspective I would normally sign up for.

But these are the Mets, my athletic avatars, whose actions — although out of my control — nevertheless shape my mood. Baseball is astrology.

Insert huge sigh here.

You could hear the Mets announcers sighing throughout the 162nd game. We wound up watching because my wife gave it some time and then asked, “And why aren’t we watching the game again?”

My plan had been to escape to the woods. Sit on a tree stump. That always puts me in a good mood. But we have a rule in our house where if you say something a second time, it’s important. I do not think it was critically important for my wife to watch the last Mets game of the year, but she knew it was essential for me.

Oh, Mets. What was the most woeful part of that last game? We all have our favorites. For me, it was when Jeff MacNeil was so surprised by Mark Vientos stealing only his second base of the season that Jeff took a called strike three without seeming even to register that he was still at-bat. It was like he was watching events from afar, like all of us watching faithfully if grimly from home.

You know who I really felt for? All the fans in orange and blue face paint who had traveled to Miami. Orange and blue are not good colors for desultory head-shaking, which was one of the only two options available in this pale affair for responding to the Mets’ flat effort. The other one was staring straight ahead, breathing only in and never out for two and a half hours. That was my approach.

It didn’t work. They lost 4-0. The Mets, who in June held the best record in all of baseball and who by the last game of the season were barely over .500, who everyone knew didn’t deserve to make the playoffs, and even if they did somehow make it, would lose back-to-back 20-0 games. The Reds lost too but the Reds held the tie-breaker because of the Mets losing all those stupid games earlier in the season.

Why, why, why? You can say middle relief pitching, you can say lack of clutch hitting, but that’s not why. The Mets are a lifelong project in recognizing things as they are, as opposed to how you want them to be. That’s why.

Oh well. As I told my wife during their second half of the season, which was like reading the second half of Flowers for Algernon, “You can’t play the games for them.” And if you could, the results would be even worse. We cannot snap a baseball bat across our knee like Francisco Alvarez after striking out for the third time. We can only dream of responding like that when we fail.

Are there any more sighs left?

Let me have one more big one.

Okay — I’m good. I’m bolstered by what Francisco Lindor told Pete Alonso after Pete’s two-out blast with the bases loaded — a rocket that looked like it was gonna change destiny and give even these Mets another chance they might not blow this time — got caught.

“You’ll get one more shot,” the charismatic, streaky shortstop told the slugging, bad-haircut first baseman. Anybody could lip-read it on the TV screen. Then Lindor put his head on Pete’s chest. Standing right there on the field. Such a comforting gesture. That’s what I’m choosing to take with me. Not Lindor grounding into a double play to end the game. Nah. The Mets never came from behind after the 8th inning all season long. Never once. Project your hopes and dreams all you want: if a team never comes back, they’re not coming back.

‘Til next year.

I’ve been trying to find a song that will make me cry, not because I personally am so sad, but to summon an appropriate response to these troubled times.

I started by making a playlist of all my favorite crying songs: “Cry to Me” by Betty Harris, “You’re Going to Make Me Cry” by O.V. Wright, “Crying” by Roy Orbison and the Spanish cover version “Llorando” by Rebekah Del Rio, as featured in Mulholland Drive, where Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in the balcony at the Orpheum are moved to utmost tears.

Not me, though. I shut crying down sometime in my early-to-mid teens. The sore throat and hot cheeks, eyelids clenching but dam inevitably bursting to flood my face until my neck felt wet — the whole sensitive childhood, done.

Now at 64, I’m wondering, how much more equanimity can one man stand? It’s not that I think crying is The Answer, but it feels like such a necessary step that when my playlist didn’t work, I hijacked a cocktail party conversation.

“What’s a song that might make a person cry?” I asked in the middle of everyone talking about artificial intelligence. I had thought about asking a chatbot for advice, but decided I would rather give up contemplative essay-writing altogether than delegate crying to AI.

My daughter Lilly jumped right in because she knew it must be important for me to not just sit there feeling disengaged.

“Chiquitita” by Abba — that’s Lilly’s crying song.

Why? It just does. Always has. I respect that. I respect all the crying songs my family and friends recommended. I made a playlist of their songs, too — and none of them made me cry.

And so I turned to Susan Rogers, former sound tech for Prince, now a neuroscientist on the faculty of Berklee College of Music and co-author of This is What It Sounds Like, a great book I’ve been reading this whole time about what determines our taste in music.

One of the many things I love about this book is that it has cured me from being a music snob. The joy one person feels in music is the same joy other people feel in different music. This is because musical pleasure is caused by dopamine produced in the auditory cortex and motor cortex, and the amount of dopamine depends on genetic predisposition and culture, plus the range of music we’re exposed to and our associated experiences. Thus, it doesn’t matter if Person 1 likes or dislikes Person 2’s music. It’s still the same joy.

The same is true for every other feeling we get from music. But that doesn’t mean a song that makes you weep will do the same for me. Susan told me straight up that trying to find a song to make me cry is like going to a party thinking, “Tonight is the night I find true love.”

You can’t force it, Susan said. What you can do is “preheat the oven.” Being moved to tears by a song correlates with two factors: empathy and subliminality. Empathy I’d heard of, but subliminality was new. It’s the willingness to be hypnotized.

I check both those boxes, theoretically. But here I am trying so hard to squeeze out a tear and… nothing.

Don’t worry about it, Susan recommended: “The song that makes you cry will probably catch you by surprise.”

This was validating because I had suspected as much. Following the guidelines in Susan’s book for identifying the characteristics that makes us love the songs we love, I had determined that the song that made me cry would feature a mesmerizing female vocal, like “Songbird” by Fleetwood Mac, but in an unfamiliar language, like “Raat Ki Rani” by Arooj Aftab, yet also be something completely different and unexpected.

So I drove around tuned intently into Will Hermes’s virtuosic playlists of old and new music, and the soulfully eclectic local radio station, WKZE. I discovered a lot of great new songs this way, but remained stubbornly dry-eyed.

Tired of waiting, last night I turned on the one song Susan had singled out as most likely to trigger a response from people who don’t have a heart of stone: “What a Wonderful World,” as performed by Eva Cassidy at a benefit concert for cancer patients when she knew from her own diagnosis that her time was short.

What a beautiful cherishing of the moment that song is.

It really is wonderful.

I cried.

Not a lot.

But enough.

Crying was never supposed to be the ending.

Crying is a start.

Love,

Mark

PS For more on grown men crying, check out This American Life, Episode 863, Act 2: “Cry Hard with a Vengeance.” Thanks to Lilly for the tip.

Thanks also to Jacob Somerscales, my drum teacher in LA, for turning me on to This is What It Sounds Like during our lesson on how to play for my Stereolab cover band.

This was for the second meeting of “Groovin’ at the Depot,” an open mic and sing-along at the New England Accordion Connection and Museum Company in North Canaan, Connecticut, next to the train depot. I brought my snare drum to the first meeting, so leaving early was conspicuous. To make it even more conspicuous, I gave a little speech about how I had to go because my wife was making spaghetti and meatballs, but I wanted to at least show up in support of the values expressed by the flyer:

· Make new friends through playing and enjoying music

· Learn how to become a better musician

· Enjoy the benefits of playing and listening to music

· Share your musical experience with others

· Discover that life is better with music.

That’s all so positive, fun, and community-minded. So there I w,as coming back like I said I would to the second meeting, locking my bike to a bench while three white-haired women took turns ringing the depot bell. It’s a good old-fashioned train station bell that you pull on with a rope so everyone can hear it loud and clear.

“You sound great,” I said while taking my coffee can and drumsticks out of my bike panniers. It’s a shiny silver Illy can that my wife said made great coffee. She always says this about every cup I make her every morning, and it always makes me feel great.

I sat down in the second row of a meeting room full of vintage accordions, sunlight, and apple cider donuts.

In the first row was a woman with a traveling fiddle. It looked sturdy and streamlined.

“It sounds great,” she said, “especially on the low notes.”

“I bet when you play it sounds great on all the notes,” I either said or wish in retrospect to have said. The important thing is we were sharing our musical experience and making friends.

Paul Ramunni is the avuncular owner and operator of the accordion museum. He got things started by saying, “An accordion is the only instrument that will not work unless you hug it first.” This may or may not be completely accurate. Don’t you have to hug a tuba? Bagpipes? I didn’t think of any of that at the time, though. Hugging music sounded good.

Paul explained about how an accordion works, involving air, reeds, and buttons you have to play on faith because you can’t see them. He launched into “Roll Out the Barrel,” which sounded like every previous performance of “Roll Out the Barrel” in all of polka history, distilled into the sunlight in the meeting room on this late summer Sunday afternoon.

A brave person came up after Paul asked who would be brave and come up first. This guy also played accordion. He had a hawk-like but not mean face. He looked like a kind hawk in a children’s book who has the courage to suggest to the other hawks, why must we always be ruthless predators? Why must we make the other animals live in fear? Instead, why don’t we make new friends through playing and enjoying music?

He played a Polish song, “Farewell to My Homeland.” I leaned forward to listen and not worry about what I would do with my drumsticks and coffee can – even though, now that you mention it, I had never played music by myself in front of thirty people before. By not worrying, I came up with an idea.

I let some more people go ahead of me because even though I liked my idea, I recognized that it was gonna be trippy. The vibe was like a church gathering of nice, mainly older people, and I didn’t wanna freak everybody out.

While I bided my time, a boy came up, stuffed into a bowtie, but not looking at all uncomfortable. He plopped himself and his accordion down in a swivel chair and grinned like he knew a great joke he couldn’t wait to tell. He played “Three Blind Mice” for 20 seconds, then another song I didn’t recognize for another 20 seconds. You can’t Shazam these things; you have to feel them. For his last song, also 20 seconds, he swiveled, fast-fast-fast, swivel-swivel-swivel.

Nothing exactly like that ever happened before or ever will again. I’m so glad we were all there to experience it together. After him, my new friend with the traveling fiddle came up and said, “We’re all playing songs from our heritage, so I want to play you this sad song from Finland.” To me, it was more pensive than sad. Her second song was jaunty. She stopped at certain points, telling us it was our turn to shout “Hey!”

Together, we all shouted “Hey!” and then low-key looked at each other, like, how ‘bout that, pretty good huh, and we’re just getting started. This was my cue to go next because my idea also involved audience participation.

I got up and said, “I want to teach you how to soul clap. That’s when you clap in eighth notes, one-ee-and-uh, for four straight beats.” I had just read about this in a terrific book about why people like the kind of music they like, called This is What it Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas.

“I’ll do it first on my coffee can. First on one side, which sounds ping-y, then again on the other side, which is more thump-y, and then we’ll all do it together.”

Do it we did. It was a triumph, and I also learned a lesson. When you are playing the coffee can, it’s best to not try and balance it on one knee, but instead to hold it between both knees. Then everything will go fine.

Here is how fine things went. Next came a guitarist who said he forgot the iPad he always uses when he plays in front of people.

“But there is one song I know by heart – ‘Sloop John B,” he said, “so that’s the one I’m going to play. Maybe the drummer will help me.”

That’s me! I’m the drummer!! Can you believe it!!! I walk into a room of 30 people where it’s like church – and I’m the drummer. What an honor. What a transformation. I am not now who I was when I walked in. Now, I’m the drummer.

I let the guitar player do his thing for the first verse and then came in on the chorus with backbeats, a thump and thump, just to let him know I heard and accepted his invitation. Then on the next chorus I added a calypso flourish I did not know I had in me. But there it was there when we needed it, inspired by musical togetherness.

Up next, a flute player and a guitarist. They played “Shine,” written in the 1910s and later popularized by Louis Armstrong. It was sweet but a little quiet until the flute-player said, “We need that drummer!”

I thumped them a lick tasty as apple cider donuts, also improvised on the spot, as inspired by the musical community.

That was it for drumming on the day. You do not want to over-drum. The groovin’ meanwhile continued, with an accordion rendition of “Morning Has Broken” that we all sang together on the inside and an autoharp rendition of “Ripple” that we all la-da-di-dah’d together on the outside.

Paul closed us out with “God Bless America.”

I shook his hand afterwards and thanked him for organizing.

He replied, “The coffee can isn’t big enough.”

I tensed up. Was this positive, fun, and community-minded?

Yes, it was.

“Next time, bring a garbage can.”

PS Another reason I went to “Groovin’ at the Depot” was to recruit musicians for my Stereolab cover band. I think an accordion-driven Stereolab cover would sound great!