Radio And The Bones We Found Frozen

And all the thorns and the roses

I did something sort of silly last week and decided to pick up the acoustic guitar. I will be 30 next month, not historically a time of neurological development that lends itself to picking up new and complex skills, but here we are. In many ways I could interpret this decision, which started with buying a 15-year-old guitar off a buddy for $50, as an exercise in vanity. I have no body of evidence to suggest that I will stick with this. The kalimba I bought at the start of quarantine has gone untouched since April; the viola that I lugged back across the country with me in January sits gathering dust in the corner of my apartment.

Nevertheless. If I put the task on paper there will be some measure of accountability, even if none of you ever ask me how the guitar thing is going.

My first lesson, with a friend who has been playing a long time, was an eye-opener. I had sort of figured, okay, there’s obviously a lot I won’t know, but I’ve played instruments before and can probably do it again. This was an accurate assessment in the way a third-grader’s drawing of the sun—jammed into the corner of the page with sunglasses on—is an accurate assessment of the star we revolve around. The amount of time we had to spend on trying to twist my left hand into the correct shape alone was substantial, and even that small-seeming act is going to be something I have to work at for a long time. The smooth strumming I had envisioned for myself, however tuneless, was thwarted immediately by the difficulty of strumming back upwards once I had strummed down. Everyone makes it look so easy—it had never occurred to me that playing the correct notes wouldn’t be a problem because I was too busy trying to solve the much more mechanical problem of “what to even do with my hands.”

Nothing collapses the abstract into the concrete like trying something new for the first time. This has been true of a lot of things in my life which I have been able to overcome or endure mostly through a pluckiness that borders on naivete. Picking up the guitar will not fall into that category, especially given my generally haphazard approach to most things.

Practice, dedication, and time. Three things not to be taken lightly. I was struck recently by a piece written in 2018 about pianist Leon Fleisher (who died recently at the age of 92) by Fleisher’s son, Julian:

A few years ago, Leon came to town to play chamber music. Sadly, due to a gig of my own, I wasn’t able to attend. The next day, as is the custom in our family, I called to ask how it went. To my surprise, he wasn’t happy. On the subject of his concerts, he’s rarely jubilant — but then again he’s also rarely blue. He offered that the problem was that there was one piece by Brahms on the program that he just didn’t know very well. In disbelief, I replied that he’d been playing Brahms for more than 80 years! How could that be? His answer left me speechless: “Not this piece. I’ve only been playing this piece for 5 years.” Let that sink in. 

“Only” five years. And here I am, like two days in, already wondering what it all means. (Maybe it means I should shut the hell up and get to work.) I’m reminded of the anecdote that Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, shared during his Tiny Desk concert, which I mentioned in a previous issue:

Ten years! To write one song! And not one that ever became particularly well-known, even as Beam himself has.

All of this would be extremely daunting if perfection and mastery were the goals, and within a time constraint more rigorous than “the end of my own life.” But I suspect that this, like most things, is worth doing because of what you learn along the way, all the annoyances and mess-ups and the joy of just kinda messing around with something.

don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it…

Stay tuned.

-Chuck