“You don’t look very comfortable playing that guitar.” - Vance Gilbert.
He won’t remember that comment, but I do. It was my first Rocky Mountain Folks Festival Song School and I was playing a piece of firewood acoustic electric that I hated and he could tell. After he said that, it was an A-HA moment for me having not put into words how that guitar felt in my hands. He was totally right. I didn’t feel comfortable with that guitar. I didn’t like it and it showed. To a guy I have never met, under a tent, in a field in Colorado.
I got home from that Song School only to have to pack up my home in Iowa and move to Nebraska. I remember clearly boxes on the floor on a hot August day, the half-empty house getting emptier with each newly stacked box in the garage when the doorbell rang.
It was my friend, Scott, who I had met around the town over the years and then became friends with when I started playing music and writing songs. He was a great first listeners and encourager in those early days when no one really undertstood what in the world I was doing. Instead of saying, “What a nice little hobby.” He said, “Keep writing.”
Scott was there with a guitar in hand, and, as I recall, said, “Here. Play this until you get your dream guitar.”
I was astounded. Unbidden and full of grace, there was Scott lending me this instrument that he said, needed a player. I couldn’t believe it.
At the time, I thought my dream guitar was some fatty tricked out Taylor I had seen at said Rocky Mountain Folks Festival vendors tent. They are beautiful guitars. Out of range and out of sight, I accepted this beautiful offering from my friend, Scott, and it got packed up with the boxes and moved with me to Nebraska.
I fell in love with that guitar. I called up Scott maybe six months later and asked him if I could buy it off him and I did buy it off him.
That was eleven years ago. Five recording projects, hundreds and hundreds of songs later, gigs and jams and Vacation Bible School, Sunday school openings, weddings and funerals, lessons and workshops, Germany, The Netherlands, that guitar has been with me down lots of roads. That guitar is a life raft, a friend, a toy, a whole universe. It has only been in the last year and a half or so that a whisper spoke and asked if I was ready for what was next. The whisper never made itself clear, but also changed my relationship with my instrument. It has been clear for some time, that she and I need to enter into a new chapter with a new guitar. A dream guitar.
And yesterday it arrived. I credit my other Song School friend, Bob, for helping me find it. I had been looking for some time. It is a Gibson LG-2 and it is a beauty! It is not vintage, it is from 2020 and exactly what I wanted. It’s hard to believe it belongs to me. I dreamed about it for so long, I worked and waited for the right time. I talked myself out of buying it coming very close on multiple attempts and then, I just bought it.
What’s it all mean? Who cares? Why overthink a guitar purchase? Why buy one in the first place when the other one served you so well?
Well, my friends, I could talk forever and ever, but I’ll just say this: we pretend virtue and nobility in playing the “not yet/Not sure/not now/just wait/it’s fine/I’m fine/I’ll make do” dance of weirdness. It’s neither virtuous nor noble if, in putting off your calling, your professional identity, your flag in the sand declaration, you inflict harm/judgment/resentment upon yourself and thus diminish the work you’re called to do.
A painter’s paints, a writer’s pen, a musician’s guitar. Decision is necessary in granting oneself permission to see oneself as an important craftsman (craftsperson). I always joked and justified my music thing to people back in the “what a fun hobby” stage of my songwriting by saying, “At least it’s cheaper than golf!”
Those days are gone. That person who minimizes her own work left a long time ago. She took her first guitar with her to make room for me. I’m so thankful she worked so hard all those years that I wanted to show her my appreciation. I wanted to show her she can trust me to finish what she started. So I bought her this dream guitar.