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Despite our resistance, we got really good really quickly. Our parents had forced my oldest brother, Joe, to learn the instrument, and they imposed the same requirement on Jeff and me. Fortunately, we both had another avenue for fluent communication: the piano. “I know,” he said, bringing another spoonful of cereal to his mouth. I must have tried to tell him something-I’m sure my mind has blocked that part out-but he just looked at me and said: I was eating breakfast with my older brother Jeff, who coincidentally spoke like me. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t stutter, but I do remember when it was first defined as such. Not that sufferers necessarily want to vocalize what’s afflicting them, for speech problems run long and deep. The phonetic makeup of the word itself seems cruel, stutter, in that its intonation peaks at the difficult and forceful “t” sound-a voiceless alveolar stop produced by blocking airflow in the vocal tract-and therefore prevents sufferers from cleanly vocalizing what’s afflicting them, rather like the blatantly onomatopoeic lisp. Only recently have I begun to figure out why: his style of playing, with its wailings and repetitions and clutter and incoherence, is my style of speaking. And it took me even longer to fall in love with it. In accordance with the natural progression of other Neil faithfuls, it wasn’t until I had exhausted this mostly acoustic, more accessible singer/songwriter side of Neil Young that I was able to graduate to an appreciation of his electric work-the highest and most challenging level a Neil faithful can reach. First semester of college I was getting high to his 1969 self-titled solo debut, and by spring I waited for rainy days to wallow in my loneliness with the haunting On the Beach, playing it over and over on an old turntable of my father’s that I had restored. Senior year I’d take the scenic route home from football practice while blaring Harvest Moon in the used Mustang I shared with my older brother, driving past the cornfields just as the setting sun made them glow and feeling nostalgic for the innocence I had yet to lose. As a junior in high school I found myself humming along to Neil Young’s “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold” whenever the local classic rock station decided to take a break from Aerosmith or Boston or AC/DC.