This Old Guitar

"This old guitar taught me to sing a love song
It showed me how to laugh and how to cry
It introduced me to some friends of mine
And brightened up some days
It helped me make it through some lonely nights
Oh, what a friend to have on a cold and lonely night."

- John Denver, "This Old Guitar"

So I was listening to this song today - yes, I listen to John Denver, willingly - and it got me thinking. First I thought, "man, that is a really great lyric..." but then my mind started to wander and I started waxing philosophic on the subject of things, their sentimental value, and why I can't seem to part with my dad's old guitar.

My dad's guitar is an Old Kraftsman, circa...oh, 1950-something. It's probably worth some money - not a fortune, but more than a yard sale price. It needs some wood work, because a degree of warping has made it essentially untuneable, and someday I'll probably invest the money to have it fixed up. Even though I don't play the guitar.

My father is still living, so this particular memento is nothing more than a semi-historic article I find cool and comforting. I have often wanted to play the guitar, and have taken a crack, more than once, at learning to play. I still have a copy of "Guitars for Dummies," and can hack out a few of the basic chords. But I don't really play. I don't guess I'm ever likely to get around to learning how to really play. But I feel like that guitar is an essential belonging that I would only part with if selling just about everything else I own wasn't bringing in enough to live on.

I am a songwriter. Well, I was a songwriter; I wrote a bunch of songs in college, a compilation I titled "Songs from the Laundry" (hence the title of this blog). And I've written a couple since then, but only a couple. I don't know if the juice just kinda dried up once I'd cleared the teenage angst from my belfry or if I let pragmatism discourage my creativity or what, but I just haven't been very prolific on that front since I was about 19. Still, I have written some songs, I love to sing, and I love other people's music. Somehow, simply possessing that guitar makes me feel like a songwriter, even though I have never used it in the writing of a song or played one of my songs on it. Even though it's been at least 6 or 7 years since I last wrote a song. I feel like a songwriter. I get the John Denver lyric, because even though I can't actually attribute any of those experiences in my life to my dad's guitar, I have had those experiences, and somehow, having that guitar makes a neat, romantic connection in my head to that nostalgia.

Now, I'm a fan of the show "Clean Sweep," that airs on TLC (bear with me, I swear this is germane to the subject at hand). For the uninitiated, this reality-type show takes a couple with serious packrat and/or cleanliness issues and re-does two rooms of their house by removing every single article to the backyard, going through it piece by piece, getting rid of at least 2/3 of it via yard sale or trash can, and redecorating the rooms before returning all the remaining possessions. I love the show because it takes people otherwise incapable of doing so and restores order to the chaos. It gives me the same nice sense of tidying up that assembling a jigsaw puzzle does, only vicariously.

But I take issue with one particular philosophy of Peter, one of the organizational experts, which is that essentially, stuff you keep for sentimental reasons should be tossed - it's the memory, not the stuff, that matters. NUH-UH! Sometimes, it's the stuff. Not so much so that you should keep every single material object you were ever given by someone else or that belonged to someone else or that has some particular memory attached to it, of course. But every once in awhile, along comes an artifact that simply holds power for you, because of what it symbolizes, or reminds you of, or enables you to feel about yourself, your past, your future.

That guitar, however dusty and unplayed, means something to me. It symbolizes the role music has played in my life. It also symbolizes all the things I've never gotten around to doing or committed to long enough to learn to do well. Hey, I didn't say the memories or symbolism were always good - but sometimes there's value in periodically being nudged out of your complacency by the twinge of things you wished you'd done a little differently. The guitar holds together some nice moments of my past, and it also holds the promise that maybe, as it sits there in the corner next to my Steinway baby grand, my daughter will decide that she will be committed enough to learn to play the guitar, and she'll write her own songs with it, and my father will have passed on one of the most important tools in her life. So I'm not gettin' rid of the guitar.