Not Just Any Guitar
Last week, I was on vacation, at least in the technical sense I was away from my day job. It was an emotionally exhausting trip, to say the least.
It started with reuniting with our daughter who had been away for over a month staying with family and going to camp. Then, we had an off-road accident in the side-by-side, that we all walked away from with no more than bumps and bruises, but had it gone just slightly differently, all three of us, plus my mom and step-dad could be dead. Then I spent a few hours a day, for three days in Bloomington with Paul Mahern cutting vocals for my next record and that went great. All my hard work paid off and I love making music. It is exhausting, but rewarding. I saw some family, had a productive business meeting in Nashville where someone was gracious enough with their time and connections to help me out, I hung out with my best friend and I met up with a new friend before driving back.
I’ve known of Shay for years. He was a good friend of my good friend Mark, but Mark never introduced us. A few months after Mark passed away, somewhat unexpectedly (we knew he was sick but he didn’t tell us how bad it was), Mark’s mother, Sonya, put us in touch. Since then, we’ve talked on the phone and texted but this was my first trip to Nashville since Mark passed last fall, so it was the first time we could get together. Once we figured out what the other person looked like, it was just like meeting up with an old friend.
Mark was very private, so I have to chuckle at the irony that perhaps the greatest gift he ended up giving me were all the people he never introduced me to. Artists are weird, Mark was certainly no exception to that, but he was weird in different ways than Shay and me, so it’s been comforting to hear that they had the same stupid arguments that he had with me. Like, me swearing that this song is 8 bars in 6/8 and him willing to die on the hill that it’s actually 12 bars in 4/4. Mark and I would get so irritated with each other, but it never impacted our friendship and I’d give just about anything to have another one of those stupid arguments.
It’s easy to remember the big things in life: vacations, births, weddings, etc., but the reality is our lives are overwhelmingly made up of these little moments that too often, get taken for granted. One of the things I am grateful for about being creative is that those are the moments that give me the palate to paint from. I too am guilty of taking them for granted, but I try my best not to. It’s impossible to give every interaction with the person who sells me a Red Bull hours of contemplation, but I can be present in that moment and give it a quick thought on my way back to the car. Maybe it’ll turn up later in my screwed up brain, or maybe it’ll just give a little more value to both the person behind the counter and myself in that moment and there will be tiny ripples that move through our day and we won’t even recognize the cause.
This guitar is one of Mark’s, very graciously given to me. My first order of business with it is to finish the song he and I wrote, even if it’s one that probably wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day if he was still here. It’ll get played, often. One, it’s what he would have wanted and two, it’ll be a way to keep all those irritating arguments and hours long conversations about the Civil War close to the front of my memory. It’s just a guitar, he doesn’t possess it, nor do I think his spirit will be present when I play it, and I know it’s not going to make me play like he did, but when I play it, I’ll remember my friend. And because of that, it’s not just any guitar.