...played it 'til my fingers bled... was the summer of '69...

I got a guitar for Christmas this year (This year? It was 2005, so technically that was last year, but is that confusing?). My parents, in cahoots with both my wife and father-in-law – a guitar player and enthusiast of several decades – bought me a Fender guitar as a combination Christmas/Birthday present. I was honestly floored. I’ve talked about learning to play the guitar now for at least seven years. Every New Years Eve I say that one year that will be my resolution. Well this year (last year?) Lauren decided to help me get going on that resolution. When my mother asked what I wanted for Christmas, she told her “a guitar.” My father-in-law did the research and sent my mom all the info and she gave them the credit card.

Lauren had led me to believe very strongly that my mother was getting me t-shirts for Christmas, which didn’t seem odd to me because that’s about the only thing I’d really asked for this year. So when she (Lauren, not my mom) pulled out this very large box from my parents to open on Christmas Eve, I was a little bit perplexed. It obviously was not t-shirts. But what would they have gotten me that big? Some kind of camping gear? That didn’t seem likely. I’ve asked my mother on more than one occasion to stick to gift cards in that arena for fear of her buying the wrong thing. I tore off the paper off the present slowly until I saw the word “Fender” printed on a cardboard box. I looked at Lauren with a face that said something like, “Are you shitting me?” I didn’t want to get too excited, because I figured maybe they had just wrapped the present inside a guitar box. Lauren’s dad buys a lot of guitars, so it wasn’t a ridiculous notion. But when I opened the box, I saw that it was, for real, a guitar.

I started giggling. I think I just kept giggling all night. It was just so funny. After talking about it for all these years, I finally had a guitar (one that was mine) in my hands, which I was going to learn to play.

As it turns out, the first time I actually picked the thing up to play it wasn’t until this past weekend. For multiple reasons really. My mom, trying so hard to do the right thing, remembered that I was left-handed and bought me the left-handed version of the Fender guitar. She apparently forgot all the times I said I only write with my left hand, while everything else is right-hand dominant. Hey, she meant well… and she footed the fairly expensive bill too, so who am I to complain? I returned the guitar for a right-hander, and with the credit leftover (because leftie guitars are so much more expensive) I was able to get a hard case for it as well. After that came a series of away jobs that kept me busy through February. After that I had no idea how to actually string the guitar and I kept waiting for a moment for when my father-in-law was over so he could help me and show me the process. Of course, every time he was over, we all got busy and forgot about that silly little guitar sitting around collecting dust.

Well finally this weekend, after Allison’s second birthday party, the two of us found a few minutes to sit down together with the guitar. He showed me how to string it, which is both trickier than I imagined, and yet exactly as awkward as I expected it to be. After that we did a cursory first lesson where he showed me a just a couple of chords and we noodled around for awhile practicing hand positions and finger placement and whatnot. Again, it was exactly as awkward as I’d always imagined it would be at first. I found it nearly impossible to keep my fingers pressed down hard enough on the strings so they would resonate the way you’d want them to, without accidentally touching the other strings around it, causing them to buzz when I played. The higher, thinner strings were the toughest. I felt as though they were slicing right through my pinky and ring fingers as I pressed down. And of course moving between two different chords with anything resembling manual dexterity was an exercise in tediousness. But hey, I knew that going into this. I knew, and still know, that it’s going to take a ton of practice to get halfway good at this. In fact, that’s probably the reason why I put off this resolution for as long as I did. What if I got bored with it? That’s a pretty expensive resolution to give up after only a couple months of sucking? And even now, struggling through chords that didn’t sound right and made my fingers feel blistery, I again wondered if I’d have the patience to stick with it.

But then my father-in-law showed me two chords that were easy to switch between. I honestly don’t remember what the names of the chords were. But switching between the two was as simple as moving my middle and fore finger up and down a single string.

((STRUM)) A low acoustic coffee house sound came humming from the guitar.

((strum)) A slightly higher coffee house sound that sounded really cool following the first.

((STRUM)) The alternating chords, combined with a simple strumming in time, was actually starting to sound like a song I might know.

((strum)) Wow, I was actually making music.

Okay, I realized instantly, I am going to LOVE learning to play this thing. Every new chord that I figure out, and every combination that sounds like actual music and not just the random plucking of strings is only going to make me love this more. I’ve never played a musical instrument. I played the drums in high school… badly. But musicians, people who can make music with an actual instrument, have always intrigued and captivated me. And when I hear a sound that could actually pass for music coming from an instrument that I’m playing, it’s going to give me a charge every time.

And tonight, when I pulled out the guitar again for a few minutes, that charge came back. It took me a couple minutes to remember exactly where each of my fingers needed to be, but I eventually found the starting chord.

((STRUM))

((strum))

Wow, I thought yet again, I’m making music. If I ever get really good at this, I hope that sense of wonder never goes away – that incredulous, disbelieving sense of wonder at the fact that I am the one actually making music. Sure, tonight I kept having to stop and recheck my fingering, and sure the strings were buzzing as much as they were resonating, and sure after a few minutes of the same two chords back and forth it was obvious I was going to eventually drive my conspiratorial wife nuts with repetition. But that was okay. This was only my second day playing and I was making music!

And then it happened. The thing that made me realize I could never ever stop. Not now. My daughter came over to watch me play. She had been playing with her new Little Peoples playhouse, fully engrossed in what she was doing, when she just stopped and turned around. She watched me from across the room for a minute or so as I struggled to keep my chords sounding right. But then she got up. She picked up her little chair and dragged it over in front of me and sat down. She watched my fingers strumming and listened to the music that accompanied the motion. She just watched me without talking, without getting bored, without getting up to do something else, and without asking if she could have a turn – just watching and listening to Dad play. And it was awesome.



My next step is to go pick up an introduction to the guitar book from the local library and start learning all the basics: notes, frets, chords, blah blah blah. I’d like to have at least a rudimentary handle on a few key concepts before I start paying for lessons. I’m psyched. I can’t remember the last time I got really psyched for something new like this. I mean it’s a muted psyche-“ment”. Kind of that disbelieving psyche-“ment” I had when I first saw the word “Fender” on my Christmas present. I can’t help but keep giggling. I’m actually going to learn to play the guitar. I would do it just to keep feeling that pleasant bewilderment of knowing I’m the one creating music. But to see that look on my daughter’s face again, watching her dad play… man, that’s just going to be the most awesome gravy I could ever think of.