Guitar

A few weeks back, I got a guitar at a garage sale. It's missing the knob for tuning the fourth string and it has some scratches on the body, but it's got a pretty nice sound still. I used a pair of pliers to turn the knob and tune it. For five bucks, it was a pretty good investment.

When I told my mom, she asked me why I got it. Not mad or anything, just curious. Because I have a perfectly good keyboard that I don't practice on near as much as I ought to, and it's entirely my own fault that I can barely mangle the melody of a hymn. I gave her several reasons, but the major one was this:

You can't take a piano on a campout.

People who knew me as a child are probably laughing their heads off.

Because I think I whined every time my parents took me on a camping trip growing up. I hated the bugs. I hated the fishing. I hated the hiking. I hated Mom waking us up at the crack of dawn (or 8:30) because we were on vacation and couldn't she just let us sleep in? I hated the disgusting bathrooms and the fact that they were a half a mile away. I hated the noisy bugs outside at night and I used to worry about them finding ways to crawl into the tent, into my sleeping bag, and into my ears while I slept. Maybe they'd lay eggs in my brain!

Now I look back and I miss the simplicity of those campouts. I miss playing cards on the floor of the tent with my sister. I miss playing board games at a picnic table. I miss swimming in lakes and taking wet jet rides. I miss roasting marshmallows over a fire. And I miss singing around a campfire.

We didn't actually do that one much when it was just my family on the camping trip. But I can remember doing it occasionally. And I loved it. I loved it as a kid, when one of my uncles brought a guitar to the Fourth of July "big family" get together. I loved it as a teen, when I went away to camp, and everyone'd gather in the meeting hall or the cafeteria and sing. I loved it the time my college friends and I went to the woods just outside of Alton and had a bonfire and sing-along that lasted until 3 or 4 in the morning.

But since then, I've never really been able to get it going at a campout or a bonfire. I came to the conclusion that my voice is not enough to lead a sing along. This is where the guitar comes in. Hopefully someday I'll be able to sing and play, even if it's just chords.

And when that someday comes, I'll be able to not only take the guitar to a bonfire, but also to a park, to a friend's house, to my parent's house, to church, to a barbeque... anywhere I want. Without needing a truck or electricity.