The Mini Guitar

Of the things I’ve driven myself away from due to necessity, louder needs (usually of others), or my inability to understand and navigate a given setting, the thing I miss the most is music.

I miss writing in song and verse. I miss melody as a subtext. I miss harmony, and real musicians playing something I wrote, creating something beautiful out of something that was just an idea. I miss spontaneous creativity, the “let’s try this” moment in a studio or rehearsal that, whether it landed right or wrong, was still throwing paint up in the air in new and exciting colors and seeing it land.

I lost that world, and then I lost the ability to play even to myself, because my hands don’t work well anymore. I was terrible at playing guitar to begin with. I described my playing ability as that of a slow twelve-year-old, but that’s not fair to slow twelve-year-olds. Then arthritis really sealed the deal.

I believe Tom Petty said, “More than four chords is a waste,” and if that’s true, I was an extremely frugal guitar player, but with a capo I still managed to write a fair number of songs that people liked, and that I liked as well.

But even more, I miss singing. While I still sing all the time, mostly under my breath or in my head, or when an appliance forces me to, that’s not the same as full-on singing, telling a story, getting it out, letting it rip. To do that, I need a guitar, and my hands will no longer close around the necks of the guitars that line my office walls, that have been my friends for decades. My fingers will no longer form chords. My right hand can barely hold a pick.

Watching YouTube one evening, I saw Ed Sheeran playing his guitar on something and thought, “Damn, I didn’t realize he was so huge.”

“Wait - that’s not right. Why is that guitar so small?”

Then I thought, “I want a small guitar!”

And then, about a year later, a couple of weeks ago, I got one.

Can I play guitar better than I used to? Absolutely not. Do I play worse? Oh yes.

But I can play it for a few minutes, and with far less pain than I can my regular guitars. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend I haven’t seen in years. We’ve both gone through changes, but we’re both still the same in ways that will always remain.

And I can sing again, wobbly and unpracticed. If I can just remember a song. Any song…

They’re coming back to me in dribs and drabs. Not my own, those are probably lost in the back of the deepest closet somewhere. But this one, for instance, by Chris Stapleton. I’m still trying to get my fingers to move again, so I’m not getting the notes and hammers in that I will eventually. No melodic picking. Now I’m just strumming, trying to hold onto the pick. But it’s a start.