Guitar Lessons

Last June, when it looked like the world would never open up, I told myself it was time to take my acoustic guitar down from its mount on the living room wall and start playing again. The shutdown was the perfect time to implement a daily practice schedule and get my callouses built up. Unfortunately, I was too distracted and disgruntled to do something as joyful and organized as playing music. I couldn’t face it. I wasn’t in the mood. All I seemed to accomplish was loads of eating and drinking. 

When I started working with Amy the life coach three years ago, she had me fill out a bunch of questionnaires about the kind of activities that brought me happiness. What did I dream of doing one day? One of those activities was writing (check!) and another was to start playing my guitar again. “But it’s too exhausting, Amy,” I whined. “I haven’t picked up my guitar in years and I’m so rusty. I have too much work to do to get back up to speed. And I wasn’t that good in the first place. Plus, I can’t sing.” 

“See what you’re doing?” she said. “You’re future pacing yourself for failure. You’re already deciding why it’s not gonna work before you try it. So you’re stopping yourself from having any joy or creativity. You’re cutting off a beautiful part of who you are.” And still, I hesitated.

Then in the fall, my friend, Ted was given a guitar by his pal, Philip and encouraged to learn how to play. “I have mysteriously fat fingers,” Ted told me. Hard to believe because the rest of him is so skinny. “Honestly, the only sounds I seem to be able to make is toinking – tionk, ploink, thryp, plonk. Philip says I must be trying to get worse.”

“Being proficient at the guitar is deceptively difficult. Someone said, ‘Learning the guitar is easy. Mastering it is difficult.” I said.

“Yeah, well I ain’t mastering nothing, Sister,” he said. “But I should be past ploinking by now. I feel like I should be able to make a sound that doesn’t make you wince.”

“It takes time. Be patient,” I said.

“When Philip asked if I was practicing, I said yes. He said I must be lying because there’s no way I could be this bad if I was actually practicing.”

“Philip is a mean teacher. You can’t expect yourself to be good after a few weeks. You have to practice for years to get good at it. Don’t give up.”

I heard my voice echoing in my ears. I sat down at the cabinet in the living room and began pulling out all the sheet music, books and notebooks that had been stuffed in there gathering dust. I used the opportunity to purge some of the stuff we didn’t need any more and started organizing the rest, trying to find the chords and lyrics to the songs I had played and sung for decades.

“Don’t throw away any of your songs!” Nick said. Of course I wouldn’t. Before I learned to play the guitar, I put my thoughts and dreams and fears down in what I thought of as poetry, filling notebook after notebook. After I learned the guitar, I could put a mood in music to my words. I could express myself in song. I wrote songs all through my teen years, into college and through my relationship with Nick. They formed a record of my emotional life. 

I learned to play guitar in the eight grade. The summer of 1974, I was thirteen and did a lot of babysitting for two sweet blonde kids while their Mom went out at night to play music gigs at parties and bars. Donna was my idol. She was twenty four years old, pretty and cool and a rock star to boot. She fronted the band and her brothers backed her up, playing The Doobie Brothers, The Allman Brothers, the Eagles, Jackson Browne and best of all, Linda Rondstat. I thought she sounded just like Linda. She offered to teach me some of her songs on the guitar if I could get my hands on one, so Grandmom bought me an inexpensive Yamaha. Donna taught me some basic chords and simple folk songs and I saved my pennies to buy a Beatles’ song book. I did my best to copy songs I heard on the radio, Dolly Parton, John Denver, Cat Stevens.

Looking through the stacks of disorganized sheet music and song books, I found notebooks full of yellowed lined paper, scraps of menus and cardboard backs of spiral notebooks covered with chords and scribbled lyrics:

I find my teenage self, my 24-year-old self in song after song about love and doubt and fear and breaking up and getting together and not being able to live without and trying to live without and wanting to not hurt, wanting to love, trying to love, not knowing how to love… 

I played the same twenty songs I learned in middle school. I strummed D, A, G, E, C, F, Am, Em. I wrote songs. I hid them away. Then I grew up. 

When Chloe was little, I decided to take official guitar lessons. Nick bought me a beautiful Alvarez with deep mellow bass notes and mother of pearl inlays. I hired an adorable teacher named Mac who taught me fingering exercises, picking techniques, how to read guitar tablature. He instructed me on how to practice, how to relax, how to have more fun. He had me make a list of songs I could play from memory around the fire at a party. He tried to get me to play the blues. I just wanted him to show me how to play songs I wanted to sing.

“Girls don’t play the blues,” I informed him.

“What about Bonnie Raitt?” he said.

“Okay, well, her. Just show me how to do Dear Prudence.”

Writing this is making me realize that my relationship with my guitar is weighted. Picking up my guitar again is like picking up my past. There’s a little sadness, because what happened to all that passion? All that longing? All that life inside of me? There are so many reminders of growing up, not only in my own songs, but in the songs I longed to learn how to play in order to express my feelings. There’s proof in my lyrics of the ways I ran love off. Or tried to run love off. 

There’s regret because I didn’t believe in myself more. And that’s when I circle back to Amy’s comment and see how my reluctance to pick up my guitar and sing with abandon is just another facet of the perfectionism I’ve been battling for decades. I allowed perfectionism to stop me in so many ways. I shut down parts of myself that didn’t meet my own standards, heading off any criticism I might have to endure. The harshest criticism came from inside my own head. The real question is will I allow it to stop me now?

Ted’s courage gave me courage. If he could tolerate sucking so bad, then so could I. It inspired me to pull my guitar down off the wall and strum a few bars. I tried to do some Travis picking on a Nancy Griffith song and I was rusty! But I was also aware that it was something I could reclaim with some dedication. 

I also have a little incentive these days to get my fingers in shape. The Official 2021 College Roommates Sixtieth Birthday Bash is happening at the house in North Carolina in May. Nance, Deb, Beth and I swore that we would make up for not seeing one another in 2020 by committing to a week together, just the four of us, and we are making it happen! Our activities will include mostly talking combined with laughing, drinking, cooking, hiking and our favorite activity of all, singing! Beth is our leader of song. She will bring her guitar and play all of our favorites, the songs we have been singing together for forty years. Deb will add her gorgeous harmonies and Nance and I will choreograph interpretive dances. But I thought I might take some responsibility this year and learn a few new songs to take the lead on so Beth and I could play together. Two guitars never hurt.

When Ted describes how long it takes for his fingers to transition from a D chord to an A, I remember those days vividly. I remember ploinking and thwyping and thinking I would never be able to play a simple song. Then, after years of practice, I could. Pretty soon, Ted will be sitting around a campfire with Philip and his other pals, playing First Kiss. I will be playing long-lost favorites from our college years with Beth and Deb and Nance, singing for all I’m worth. And we will both be able to tell Amy that we didn’t cut ourselves off from creativity and joy.