…that I dragged an old guitar out of a closet in my dad’s house, and walked down to Midwest Music to buy strings, a couple of tuning machines, and a book on how to make chords.

A girl in my church youth group whom I hated with whom I fought constantly – Cindy Soper – had brought a guitar to the last meeting.  And I figured if she could play it, I could, too.

So I put the guitar – which had probably come from a department store, and had been left in my dad’s classroom years before (he’d brought it home the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and had been sitting in one closet or another ever since)  – back together, strung, and started paging through the Gene Leis “Nexus” chord book and a book of seventies song sheets, trying to piece one and two together. 

It was terrible.  The damn thing wouldn’t stay in tune for love or money.  With its crack down the bottom of the front panel, it sounded like a truckload of steel wire on a gravel road. 

Fortunately, I was able to borrow a decent guitar from one of my dad’s college students, someone who didn’t play much – a Yamaha classical.  And it eventually worked.  And the following winter, I put my paper-route money into my first real guitar of my own, a little Ventura acoustic that I still play.

It was probably two years before I told anyone that I played; I wanted to be real, real good – or at least not embarassing – before anyone found out.

Years later, I told Cindy that I’d started playing guitar largely because of her.  She rolled her eyes and laughed.  “I quit playing probably a few months after you started!”

Life lesson; anger is the best motivator!

It was thirty years ago today that my oldest, best friend – the guitar – dropped into my life.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 4:10 am and is filed under mitch, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.