I haven’t played guitar in a long time. I’m lost with it, again.
I always wanted to play music with other people, but it’s so hard to get people to pull together in one direction. Trying to sit in with other musicians, I can’t play like that. Can I?
I’ve felt shut out of the music world for a long time, and a lot of it about being a girl. In those few times I could play original music with a band, it was the best thing ever. I got to experience that. But it never lasted very long at all. I watched the boys pull ahead of me. I learned I had no talent, even though I do.
When I hear someone like Albert King play, I have the most incredible longing. That longing I’ve had ever since I can remember, ever since I saw my dad play banjo on the porch when I was in preschool, the two songs he knew how to play. Ever since the Sears Catalog that came at Christmas time, thumbing through to the back pages, where the instruments were. Ever since Santa brought me my first guitar (from Sears) over 30 years ago.
It’s been such a heartbreaking journey, the opportunities wished for that never came, and those that were missed. The encouragement, and the discouragement. Disappointment upon disappointment. The disillusionment of what music is and means in this culture today, the inability to make it work for me. Thinking if I could only find a couple other people who could share a vision. But I’ve failed time and again and it feels like the biggest failure of my life. It always seemed so relatively easy for the boys behind the green door.
It feels like the most unfinished business, that if there is such a thing as reincarnation, if I die and come back again some how as a human being, this is the one thing I will need to finish, starting young, and not stopping this time.
My guitar embodies my greatest dreams, greatest battles, and greatest regrets. I wish I’d been better prepared for that journey and all it was going to serve me.
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