…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.<\/p>\n
A girl in my church youth group whom I hated\u00a0with whom I fought constantly\u00a0– Cindy Soper\u00a0– had brought a guitar to the last meeting.\u00a0 And I figured if she <\/em>could play it, I could, too.<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0and had been sitting in one closet or another ever since)\u00a0 – 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was terrible.\u00a0 The damn thing wouldn’t stay in tune for love or money.\u00a0 With its crack down the bottom of the front panel, it sounded like a truckload of steel wire on a gravel road.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 And it eventually worked.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n It was probably two years before I told anyone <\/em>that I played; I wanted to be real, real<\/em> good – or at least not embarassing –\u00a0before anyone found out.<\/p>\n Years later, I told Cindy that I’d started playing guitar largely because of her.\u00a0 She rolled her eyes and laughed.\u00a0 “I quit playing probably a few months after you started!”<\/p>\n Life lesson; anger is the best motivator!<\/p>\n It was thirty years ago today that my oldest, best friend – the guitar – dropped into my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …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\u00a0with whom I fought constantly\u00a0– Cindy Soper\u00a0– had brought a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}