I stayed up a bit late last night making granola. Late for me was eleven. There are younger versions of me for whom that would not be late. There are younger versions of me for whom that would be very, very late.

There are not many younger versions of me who would have altered their bedtime to make granola. 

Baseball game on TV? Check. Friends and family over? Check. Great novel? Check.

But granola?

I am not making a granola recipe that I found while watching social media. I think there are a lot of Tik Tok and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook videos about granola, perhaps an entire community of granola-ites that share videos and recipes and try to influence each other. 

I am disinclined to make a video about this granola recipe. I think I could learn and have been trying to learn a bit. Based upon the number of views I’ve had, I have not learned, not enough.

This idea of views, of measuring success or value based upon how many people have looked at something I have created, has changed me. Even if I stay away from social media, my mind simply can’t stay away from wondering how I might get more views when I create something.

My creative process ranges from writing poetry, writing songs, taking photographs, making videos, writing blogs, writing stories, drawing and sometimes painting, creating 3D models to print on my 3D printer, and working with wood, which also includes modeling with CAD software and using my CNC machine in my makerspace.

As I create in these ways I can’t stop myself from thinking, “How can I share this with others?” I think that is a natural reaction, that I’d want an audience for the creative work that I do.

I remember the first time I discovered that I wanted an audience. I was at my friend Paul’s house in North Manchester, Indiana. It was the summer of 1983. Paul had just gotten a small boombox for his birthday.

Boomboxes were portable stereos. At that point in the early 1980’s they used cassette tapes exclusively to play any music you wanted anywhere you wanted, provided you had the tape and batteries. 

I think it was a cultural phenomenon. I say think because at that point, how did we know? There were no social media influences, no internet to look at them or buy them or put ads in our way to want them. 

We knew because our friends started getting them. When we saw one, we wanted one. We also knew because we saw them on MTV, provided we had cable. 

My family got cable around 1982 or so. Until then I only saw MTV at my Grandmother’s house in Ohio or at a friends. I didn’t have many friends. I was only marginally being influenced.

But that boombox was revolutionary for me. Paul and I marched around his house with it on our shoulders, blasting Def Leppard throughout his house and around his yard. 

What really changed my life was the record button. Paul’s family had an upright piano to the left of their front door. I sat down at the piano one day, with my one year of piano lessons five years behind me, and started playing and singing. Paul was laughing, so I kept going.

“Hang on,” he said, running into his room. He came right back and said, “Do that again” while at the same time putting a blank tape into the boom box and hitting the record button. 

So, I made up more nonsense, banging out chords, yelling partially in-tune words. And Paul recorded it. 

Then he played it back. And we laughed. And laughed. And then played it for our friends Craig and Scott the next day. And they laughed. 

It was short. It didn’t make sense. It had very little musical quality. I didn’t care. People were listening to something I did. 

I had an audience.

Later that year I got my own boombox for my birthday in October. It was bigger than Paul’s, of course. That’s what you did. Your friend got a boombox. You got a bigger one. Then they got a bigger one. And so on. 

Getting close to Christmas that year I was riding with my dad to Fort Wayne to get a new color television, bigger than our now broken old one, to fill the living room. I remember my excitement for that process, riding there with him, when I had a moment of inspiration. 

“I’m going to record an album, Dad,” I said. 

“Ok,” he said. 

I figured I would just make up songs like I had at Paul’s. And record them. And do this over and over, not really writing songs, just yelling nonsense and banging the piano.

I had to finish the album by Christmas, two weeks away. It was go time.

Our piano was the only instrument in the house, a black baby grand piano that was well out of tune. It was in the living room, the middle of the house. I wasn’t doing this alone in my room. I was sharing it with the entire family. Live. 

I had a sixty minute tape to fill, so I began to record. I tinkered around with a few notes first, sticking with the few chords that I knew. Then I hit the record button.

My first song was about a boy with no feet. I titled it, “The Boy with No Feet.” I was very, very clever.

Next I wrote, “I Have a Pet Rhinoceros.” Next, “I am a Penguin.” 

Most of my family hid somewhere. My sister Cara, though, came out and said, “I want to do this too.”

“Ok,” I said, “you can play drums and sing back-up vocals.”

She used pots and pans and yelled in the background. It was glorious.

It took me about four hours to record sixty minutes of this. I took another couple hours to create an insert for the tape cases. I called myself “Maverick Mahatma” (I am a big fan of Gandhi) and Cara was “The Mendacious Fops”.

The album was called, “Magnum Opus”. Probably a bit pretentious of me, but it was my magnum opus.

I gave my family and my few close friends these tapes. I had an audience.

I’m not sure how much of an audience though. I know that Cara listened. I know that Paul and his brother Kyle listened. And a few others. 

They clicked the 1980’s era “like” button: they told me they’d listened. Not necessarily that they liked it, though I think they did.

I listened though. As terrible as the songs were, both their content and their noise, I listened to them over and over. I felt a spark of something, this urge to keep creating. It was thrilling.

My life was only two years past the “list your ten friends” debacle, where I completed the list with the names of my siblings and my dogs. It was four years past the paper route debacle where I ended up in therapy.

Looking back, thinking about who I was–especially now after twenty-eight years of teaching, of knowing introverted students who avoided other students and sat by themselves at lunch–this was a moment that could never have been in my story until suddenly, it was.

If this was a movie, music would play. But not the music I was writing then. It was, at best, music-ish.

The next year I recorded a second album, “Opus II”. Then “Opus III”, and “Opus IV”, all the way to “Opus XIII”. Fourteen years of albums, all told about five hundred songs, give or take a hundred.

I kept handing out the albums. Most of them kept not getting played. 

The quality of the music got better. I learned to play the guitar and bought a drum machine. I bought a Tascam 8-Track recorder and a Shure microphone. I kept making them in the week before Christmas, writing quickly and moving on.

It didn’t matter to me at some point whether anyone listened. The songs were not serious. The albums were parodies of real albums. The songs were parodies of real songs. I didn’t need to worry about writing so-called real music.

And I realized something still precious to me: I’m the audience that matters.

There are a few songs of these five hundred that I still marvel at. When I hear them again, I sometimes get goosebumps. I feel this warm flush rise from the back of my neck to the top of my head. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I sing along. Sometimes I cry.

I have no plans to share them with anyone, to post them online in an attempt to get views and likes. To hope that someone else might find joy from them. 

I’m not willing to spoil what I have. Suppose I got no likes? Suppose it was a platform where they could receive dislikes? Where negative comments could change my own relationship to these creations?

These songs are touchstones, direct lines to memories and emotions and eras of my life that are long past and fading too quickly. Memories of my sister and my family and my friends. 

There are other things to share, other songs that I’ve crafted over years, have rewritten and recorded professionally and have already sent off into the world of views and likes. 

I am able to write and share music and poetry and blogs now because I experimented those many years ago without expecting views and likes. Without needing an audience as wide as the world. 

I hope that I’m not actually mendacious. Or foppish. If I am though, so be it.

My granola is not these things. It is salty and sweet and crunchy and indifferent and a lifeline to the past and a touchstone for the future.

It is comfort and nutrition and memories and tastes like home.

Like it or not, it’s good. Really good. 

In this empty nest I seem to have no audience to share it with, not the taste, not the smell, not the substance.

And how to share it? A picture, a video, a blog? Just shadows.

But as poetry? Hmm. I think so, yes, poetry. 

Here you go, world. Have a view.