Making Grown Men Cry

Yesterday I donned the beautiful white suit and played the Henderson Center Farmer's Market. They love me in the farmer's market. I sing a lot of the old songs and a few of my own. I tell dumb jokes. I generally entertain them while they wait for people to come buy their vegatables and flowers and fruits.

So I picked up the nylong string guitar, which is the one with the fat neck and the quiet strings. It's better for finger picking songs rather than the steel string guitar (pictured at left) which is a better strumming guitar because the sound is sharper.

I started playing an old song, Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound." Halfway through the song, I noticed that my words seemed to have an echo. I thought that I had the amp on some kind of reverb (though the little amp I use for these gigs does not have such a feature) but then I looked to my left and saw a guy about my age, baseball cap and t-shirt, mouthing the words with me. When I finished, he was crying. Crying! He said, "It's been a long time since I've heard that song. It brought back memories."

As I always say, if you can make a grown man cry with a song, you're doing a damned fine job.

He stuck around for 45 minutes of the set, so I played some more old songs and threw a few of my own in there. He was suitably impressed with my originals and sang along with all the old songs. Some performers would have been thrown off, but I saw it as a compliment that he wanted to sing along. Hey, it beats what happened at the Arcata Farmer's Market, where the booking agent's dog lay in a pickup truck next to the performer's booth and howled every time I played the harmonica.

I always feel good after these gigs. Yesterday I felt a little better, as if the white suit and the beautiful guitar had done their work and I was the vessel for a fellow human's memories.