You know what big cities don’t have? Good camp songs.

I mean, you need like a camp fire and an open night sky full of stars and grass and room enough for a circle. Closest place would be Coney Island in NYC and that’s just… well YOU try making a good bonfire at Coney.

Camp songs. Like Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya. Or We are, we are, we are, we are the order of the Forks. Or Dem bones gone rise again — which might double as a chain gang song, I’m not sure, but you certainly wouldn’t get a Diamond Joe gone catch me, Diamond Joe through New York. It takes a special thing.

For instance: I remember being at Camp Joy in Boy Scouts and going to knot-tying class with Jim Nash — Andy’s dad. And we all sat around and tied our knots and Jim was working his way with a knot in the back of the makeshift amphitheater, all of those hand-planed benches on stumps holding our weight. And Jim’s a working and a working and we’re all making our little half hitches and square knots, naming them because the man wanted us to name them. I probably named mine fluffy or something, who knows.

And we go around the whole circle and it finally comes to Jim

“Well Jim?” asks the camp counselor.

And Jim holds up his hangman’s noose and says, “I call him Clyde.”

Yeah, that wouldn’t fly in the city’s day camps for kids. That afternoon, we heard another camp song and it fit the bill perfectly — fit my emotions while I stood there giggling inside at the hangman’s noose. And I hear that same song every time I hear an automated recording on the subway telling me to stand clear of the closing doors or that there’s train traffic up ahead of us — every time I get out and see Times Square because I just couldn’t commute around it — I hear the song, Announcements, announcements, announcements! What a terrible way to die! What a terrible way to die! What a terrible way to be talked to death, what a terrible way to die!