Playing for Mosquitos

I play guitar. I do not claim to play well. I do decent enough for my personal amusement; I seldom play for other people and I am a nervous wreck when I do.

However, this seclusion has led to lack of playing and enthusiasm for doing so.

Music, apparently, needs an audience. Or at least a little encouragement.

When I first learned to play, I was around 11 years old. I'd had a few years of piano and my piano teacher and I were at an impasse: she was insisting I play only classical music and I wanted to learn what I was hearing on the radio. By that time, I'd discovered pop music and wasn't listening to the country music of my earlier years.

I was into the Adult Top 40 music that Casey Kasem counted down on his show every Sunday. Mrs. Arrington was having none of that. I remember how she banged on the piano one day in total frustration when I brought in a piece of pop music and said I wanted to learn that.

My piano lessons ended that afternoon, I think. Ah well.

I also played flute in the band. My father played the guitar and had several around the house. One was a small parlor Gibson. He did not play it but it was there and I picked it up. I purchased a Hal Leonard book on how to play the guitar and sat about learning how to play chords and pick out a few little tunes.

Once I had the hang of it, the guitar was my instrument. My parents bought me an electric guitar, which I still have although it has a short in it and doesn't work right now, and I played in a disco band throughout high school. While other kids asked, "Do you want fries with that?" I went out on Friday and Saturday nights with four other kids who were into music. We earned about $200 a gig. It kept me in gas money, anyway.

My mother enjoyed hearing me play and was encouraging. She was much more encouraging with my music than with my writing. She would ask me to play for her frequently, and I did because I liked to practice.

I paid for my own lessons for a time after I could drive, and again after I married.

It was marriage that stopped the music, I'm afraid.

My husband seldom if ever asked me to play the guitar. I'm afraid I don't recall a single instance of him saying, "Honey, would you sit and play for me?" He plays no instrument nor can he sing. Maybe I sound really terrible to him, I don't know. He sometimes listens if I am playing, but he also doesn't hesitate to turn on the TV even if I am playing. There is nothing more irritating than being in the middle of Leaving on a Jet Plane and having your husband come in and flip the TV on to Andy Griffith.

So I focused on my job, my school, and my writing, which eventually became my work and something that I'm fairly good at. I am not clever at it, and I daresay I will never be known much beyond the borders of Botetourt, but I'm ok with being on the B shift as far as writers go.

The guitar is still something I love. As I have aged, I've switched out instruments, trading in an Ovation guitar and a 12-string guitar for a Takamini classical. I played that a long time - about 20 years - but I put it down for a while, and when I returned to it, it simply didn't fit me anymore.

So I bought a Taylor GS Mini. It is smaller and closer to the size of the Gibson I learned to play on. I fooled around with that for about two years, and then this September I found a cheap Epiphone electric guitar.

It weighs about as much as a regular-sized dreadnaught Gibson, I suppose. It definitely doesn't weigh as much as a regular electric guitar. So I bought it, and now I am playing it fairly regularly, almost every other day, even though I can tell it's a cheap guitar.

And that doesn't matter, because there's no one to hear. Just the bugs in the walls, or the squirrels that are too close the house.

I make music to the sound of silence, and the sounds I do make bounce around and echo until they find their way out a crack. My guitar could be playing the happiest tune in the world, and there's no one to hear but me.

Or it could be crying as sadly as a whippoorwill that lost its mate.

And not a soul would know it.