Strike a Chord

Strike A Chord

Today’s Daily Prompt on The Daily Post is:  “Do you play an instrument? Is there a musical instrument whose sound you find particularly pleasing? Tell us a story about your experience or relationship with an instrument of your choice.”

 

I began to play the guitar in my senior year of high school. My father bought me a little Martin New Yorker.  I think he paid less than $200 for it back in 1965;  today it would cost about $3000.  And it’s gone.   In 1977 my apartment was robbed and the Martin went with the robbers.  That was probably the most difficult loss of a material thing that I ever endured.  But my father bought me another guitar, a Guild, to replace the Martin.  I liked it well enough, and it has been an good guitar, but just not the same.   I still have it; it lives in my clothes closet, sadly unused.  I have not played it for so long that the calluses are gone from my fingers.

 I played the guitar  consistently from 1965 until 1999. Never a classical guitarist, I was a folk guitarist.

 

I loved to sing folk music and accompany myself on the guitar.

I relegated the guitar to the closet in 1999 because I guess I had lost interest in it.  I also did not want it to be known that I could play, because I would then be enlisted to play church music at Mass here at the house where I live.  I didn’t want to do that.

But thirty years of loving playing the guitar were a great source of joy to me.