WordPress, the host site for this blog, collects information on where people are who have been reading my blog posts. In order of frequency, my readers are in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Australia, China, Chile, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Costa Rica, Albania, Argentina, India, Brazil, Mexico, Belgium, and Thailand.

This is both humbling and exciting.  I cannot for the life of me imagine how or why they would have stumbled on A Year of Guys, and I cannot for the life of me imagine how I come across to an English reading person in, say, Albania or Costa Rica. My lack of fluency in any language other than English is an embarrassment, and I am not widely traveled. 

And yet, because of my profession, I look at that list of countries and hear music – many different kinds of music, each distinctive. 

It was Henry David Thoreau who said of his geographically-restricted, but observationally-rich life in Concord, Massachusetts, “I have traveled widely in Concord.”

Music – and now, this blog – has allowed me to travel much more than widely that the visa stamps on my passport will ever show.