Two Steps Back

I have been playing guitar since I was about thirteen. While high school band and chorus provided me with musical training, a fair ear, and a chance to play a single-voiced trumpet, I never found the time to take guitar lessons, never took time to get some formal training with my favorite polyphonic instrument. I am, as it were, entirely self-taught. And obviously, as a teacher, I lacked certain skills.

It didn’t hold me back. In the small group of friends and acquaintances in which I usually performed, I could hold my own. I played by ear, with the help of the chord diagrams in the easy guitar sheet music, and the fact that so many folk, rock and pop songs are three chords and a bridge. If it hadn’t been for John Denver, I’d've been sunk. But after thirty-some-odd years, I needed to take it to that “next level” people too often talk about. I’ve swallowed my pride, and submitted to the ultimate indignity.

I’ve signed up for guitar lessons.

Some of my friends, the non-musical ones, might be kind of surprised at that. I mean, a few of them have seen me hold forth for six hours straight, never repeating a song, and playing until my fingers bled.

Literally.

My musical friends know it’s what I need to do, however. I need to put my soul into it, into the guitar itself. The songs that I’ve written have withered to nothing because I have nothing new to put underneath the words that sometimes spill out in torrents. I must find more materiel with which to build the musical framework, upon which those words can become something more than maudlin, childish attempts at profundity.

Or so I hope.

So, I’m going back to school, or at least to private lessons. I will finally put my money where my mouth is, take the lessons, and start, as my high school band director called “woodshedding”, by which he meant, “take it out behind the woodshed where no one can hear you and practice, practice, practice”.

What do I want to do with it? Maybe nothing. Maybe write more songs, maybe just learn to play guitar better. Maybe give up all this singer-songwriter stuff, and play “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”, and the guitar transcription for Bach’s “Suite for Two Violins” (yeah, like I’ll ever be that good!). Or maybe I’ll start playing bluegrass.

One thing for sure; in a few weeks, I will have new grist for the mill: new skills, new knowledge, new inspiration.

I’ll have my music back in my life.

Scented Sensibility

I rose early…early for me, anyway…and bustled about my morning routine, working hard to get out of the house before my usual half-hour-later-than-I-should. The cat had been fed and medicated, the dog had been given her forty minutes in the sun before being crated for the day, and I was set to head out.

I unlocked the door, stepped out on my back deck…and it hit me.

I am not the world’s most effective, diligent amateur landscaper. I mow the grass… or the dirt… from the comfortable yellow seat of my green John Deere lawn tractor; I cut the whole yard, bermuda, crabgrass and sandstone disguised as soil, in about an hour; but I don’t usually get the trimmer out to trim the grass under the flowering-whatever trees or edge the edges or trim the boxwoods by the front porch more than once a…month? A year?

Whatever.

And I don’t worry about the vine growing all over one side of my rear deck. The vine that is overcoming the Sky-chair stand, and the wire utility shelf, the deck rail, and slowly crawling up through the screen over the kitchen window. The vine that will probably take over the whole back wall of the house someday.

The honeysuckle vine.

I know. It’s agressive. It’s wild. It’s untamed. It’s getting more nourishment than it needs from its roots in the old compost bin. It will challenge kudzu with its threat to life, liberty and the occasional small animal. It will become a nuisance, maybe even a danger in its moist leafy weight.

It smells like Heaven. Its scent is dawn on a summer day. Its scent is a childhood memory of my brother showing me how to find a drop of candy by gently pulling the stamens out through the base of the flower and putting the nectar on my tongue, and his laugh as he saw my surprise. Its scent turns my overrun, less-than-orderly, more-than-messy old back deck into a little garden, into a little kiss from God.

I have a brown thumb. I have managed to kill everything from azaleas to zoysia. I can’t grow corn, or turnips, or broccoli, or tomatoes. I can’t even grow mold under my house. I will never have a Better Homes and Gardens home and garden. At my age, I can’t even grow taller. But I don’t worry about the bare spots in my lawn, or the failed tub of mint and catnip by the chiminea.

I think I will leave the honeysuckle vine to grow for a while. I think I will wait until the deck starts to sag, and we have to dive into our savings tearing it down and building a new one. I think that when that happens, I will see if I can plant a new vine by the old compost bin. I don’t need a garden, I need a honeysuckle vine.

I need a little bit of Heaven outside my back door.