Why I make myself walk by guitars.

Draft two

Why I make myself walk by guitars.

Much of my life, with rare exception, I have been within reach of a guitar. From my teens forward, a guitar was around constantly, I was playing it, learning with it. These are the pictures of myself I want to keep in my head.

 I now have two in the house. I brought them out of deep storage a few years ago, getting new strings and picks and nice stnads for them. To play for my daughter.

 She is a sensory child, and cried the first time I strummed a chord for her.

At first I put the guitars away, the acoustic into it’s thick case, the hollow body electric into the gig bag, dragging them out, and even hooking them to the amp a few times in the basement. That didn’t last, soon the guitar’s became like my grandhfather’s, secured into back closets or the guest room.

Recognizing this, I bought nice stands for them.

First, just the acoustic in the bedroom.

A 4 year old running around a house, amidst rampages that had jewelry boxes and nightstands spread across the house, the guitar she approached with reverence.

Oh so slender fingers reach out, pull the pick from between the strings, strums it gently, smile spreading, eyes wide.

The red electric hollow body, not an expensive guitar, looks it there in the sun room.

It looks like it would in those pictures I keep in my head, and the new ones, where my daughter is reaching out and touching it.

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Draft one

For much of my life, since I was fourteen, and with rare exception, I have always been within a few steps of a guitar. This is a habit that I developed as a teenager, when I wanted a guitar arund all the time, because I was playing it, learning with it.

Few things stir up memories and ambition in me more that just picking up a guitar and playing as little as a single verse, or writing just a few sentences. Writing, well there is almost no single time I am not capable of writng, and saving things that come to mind, or stories that should be written, I have no excuse for not doing this, but guitars are a different story.

You can remove them from your life very simply. Although as a teenager it seemed like everyone played guitar. As an adult, an older adult, it is an entirely diiferent story.

There are still musicians, but they run in their own circles, and soon the only guitars you might see is a dusty one in the corner behind the recliner that you know hasn’t been picked up since, before you’d last picked one up.

I think about that a lot, now and even when I first started playing, the image of the dusty guitar there in the corner, needing playing, thinking that is tragic, and perpetuating that exact image all around the places I live lately.

I have guitars, I don’t play them enough. That’s why I make myself walk by them.