A Path to Transcendence

My Embarrassingly True Tale of Learning to Play Guitar

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. Thanks for being here. As usual, I’m including an audio, if you would rather listen than read. This week’s pocket is a longer one. If it appears truncated in your email, just click through and you should be able to read it all in one go.

Happy Father’s Day. To honor my dad and my husband, I put together a pocket to celebrate one of the things they love most, other than me, music. I’m sharing something I wrote several years ago about my journey learning to play the guitar. This is a pocket about creativity, failure and the power of the right teacher. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please click the heart at the bottom of the post and consider sharing it with a friend. And, if you need a last-minute Father’s Day present, why not gift a subscription?

My husband and my dad are different, to say the least. Dan used to ask me to order our Chinese food extra, extra spicy. When the waiter at the Thai place asks my dad his spice level, he says no spice. Dan has been running several miles a day for as long as I can remember, while my dad prefers bowling. It’s one of the things he’s insanely good at along with ping pong and shooting hook shots (Play Horse with him at your own risk), but he definitely doesn’t run. He really doesn’t even walk. He will drive his car as close to the bowling alley entrance as he possibly can. One thing they do have in common though in addition to their loyalty and devotion to the people they love, is their love of music.

Both Dan and my dad are self-taught musicians. Neither ever really had formal lessons, to my knowledge. My dad taught himself to play piano by ear trying to make out “In My Life,” by the Beatles. Dan taught himself to play guitar because he wanted to write songs, and he, like my dad, wanted to learn the Beatles, along with the Clash and the Ramones.  One of the first songs he ever learned was “The KKK Took My Baby Away.”

My parents came to visit us in Spokane this past week. On Tuesday night, Dan made baked ziti, and I sat on the porch soaking in time with my parents. I decided to do something I hadn’t done in a long time, something I probably wouldn’t have done in front of most other people, my parents being a forgiving audience.  I took out my guitar. I played “Landslide,” “Country Roads,” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” among a few other songs, and my parents and I sang together.

My dad loves to sing. He is a master at Karioke. I guess that is actually another thing he and Dan have in common. In fact, he and my mom just came back from a cruise to Alaska, and he won a Karioke contest singing his, and most other white people’s go to favorite, “Sweet Caroline.” I wish I could have been there, but I am grateful to have seen the video. His stage presence, rhythm and timing were incredible. He told me this past week that he wants to write a song.  He just isn’t sure where to start.

Please join me in raising a toast of encouragement to my dad, and to all of us who falter when taking a creative step. Maybe just start right here, Dad. One note at time. 

I believe in you. “In my life, I love you more.”

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Photo by Sergei Sushchik on Unsplash

I play the guitar.

Not like Jimi Hendrix or Joni Mitchell.

Not even close.

Most people who play the guitar can play better than me.

I don’t have a good ear or sense of rhythm.  I clap like a middle-aged white woman. I don’t know a single song by heart.

But I can play a few songs.

My version of “Landslide” might not sound quite like Stevie Nicks’, but I have a voice that almost forgives my other musical flaws, and with enough practice and application of my basic guitar skills, I am able to play something that a person passing by on the street might actually recognize as “Landslide.”

I could not always play guitar.

I decided I would learn in college. I borrowed my boyfriend’s guitar, and he taught me a few chords. I moved to Paris. He remained in New Orleans. I sent him a mixed tape as a gift, some original songs and some covers including Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” He sent me a tape in return on which he also played “Wildflowers,” “just in case I wanted to know how it really sounded.” And even with that exchange and the physical distance between us, we stayed together. Twenty years later, we are still together, trying to gracefully navigate the space between honest feedback and our feelings.

In Paris, I practiced alone in my dorm room in the 19^th arrondissment. I played the Takamine I purchased with my earnings from nights waitressing on Bourbon Street. My boyfriend told me I should have consulted him before purchasing a guitar. He had been playing music for years and would have helped me make a better choice, get the most for my money. I regretted not asking for his help at the time, but after twenty years of cooperative choices, of helping each other make better choices, after twenty years of revising ourselves in the hopes of becoming our best selves, I silently cheer for my naïve 19 old year-old self… independent, selfish, strong and untethered, splurging her entire summer savings on a mediocre guitar.

In my dorm room, I repeated the basic chords my boyfriend taught me, C, D and G. I tried to teach myself a few songs, but I tried to learn them without listening, and there’s not much in life you can learn without listening. I was lonely. I spoke French but not fluently. I made a few friends, who were also studying abroad, but the friendships were born more out of necessity than actual kinship. I was in love, and my boyfriend was miles and miles across the sea. We were students. It was 1998. There was no instant messaging or Facetime. It was too expensive to speak to each other on the phone, so we wrote letters. He wrote every day, so perhaps you can better understand why even if one of those letters contained a mixed tape of the actual way to play Tom Petty’s music, I held on to him. I held on to him because with his skill and pedantry came authenticity, and with his authenticity came loyalty and devotion. The letters were sent par avion, and they took weeks to arrive, so those first few weeks, we worried that we had forgotten each other. And in those lonely weeks, I held my guitar and repeated the few chords I knew as if my life depended on them. I struck the chords and belted the lyrics to ward off loneliness. Sometimes I did this late into the night, and sometimes, there would be a refrain to my chorus from beyond my door, someone piecing together enough English to let me know what I could do with myself, my lack of talent and my guitar.

I wasn’t phased by the taunts of my neighbors, or by the lack of reception to my playing. I wasn’t overly concerned about my failure to learn how to play. I was neck deep in failure already. I was depressed and desperately homesick for my life in New Orleans. I was lost and lonely. My aunt and uncle lived just outside London, and I rode the Chunnel to visit them a few times. My aunt must have been about the age I am now. She had three kids. She was married and settled, and she was speaking to me, as someone who had lived through similar experiences. She was counseling me to take advantage of my opportunity, to be free, to travel and see the world, to drink in every drop. I knew that is what I was supposed to be doing, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I was in such a beautiful place, surrounded by culture, learning and opportunity, but I felt so alone, so sad, lonely and depressed. I was empty and aching, and I just wanted to go home. I was failing at junior year abroad.

I was told if I stayed that it would get better, but I didn’t listen. I emailed my dean and begged Tulane to take me back, let me resume my studies without tacking on extra time. My old wise dean didn’t understand, but she was merciful, and I no longer cared about my failure. I was going home.

Back in New Orleans, I resumed my life. I no longer needed to belt away my loneliness, and so my Takamine took up space in my closet. I graduated college and began my teaching career. Dan and I stayed together, and each year for some reason or another, we found ourselves moving to a new apartment. We hauled the Takamine through each move along with Dan’s Martin and a futon I remember thinking was classy because it was made out of wood and not metal. Dan formed a band and started gigging, and he realized that he needed a better performance guitar, and so he bought a Breedlove with a built-in amp. We then owned three acoustic guitars in addition to Dan’s bass and electric guitar and a few assortment of other instruments Dan picked up from time to time. This seemed a bit much for a home where only one person played music, so I gave my Takamine away.

Dan tried to teach me to play over the years. I spent many a moment sitting next to him on the futon trying to learn.

The lessons went something like this.

“What song do you want to learn?”

“I’m not sure. Something not too hard.”

“You can just pick. We can figure it out.”

“How about ….(insert random song that I thought might be worth learning).”

“I think I know that.” He would tune up, mess around for a few minutes, hit a few wrong notes, and then a few minutes later be playing the whole song. “I think that’s right.”

And it was, it was always right.

“Are you in tune?”

“No. I don’t know how to tune.”

“You should learn how to do this. You should know how to tune your instrument.” He picked up the guitar I was playing and made it sing.

He would show me the strumming pattern. I would play along with him. We sounded great together as long as I played inaudibly, but he picked up on this and would stop playing, and then I was lost.

“Why did you stop?”

“Because you stopped.”

“Don’t stop. Keep going. See if you can hold the rhythm on your own.”

So I did, and I could not.

“Listen. Can you hear the rhythm? Listen to the strumming pattern. Now try it.”

And I would. I would try so hard to listen, and then I would try to play, but I was lost, and I knew I would not get it right.

“Does that sound right?”

I was too embarrassed to tell him that nothing sounded right or wrong. I couldn’t tell the difference. Too embarrassed in front of this man who watched me give birth to our daughter. I felt stupid, incapable of learning something that was apparently super simple.

Dan taught me the basic chords and the barre chords, and I succeeded at learning those, but when he tried teaching me songs, I wasn’t following him, and he grew frustrated. I was hurt by his frustration and embarrassed by my inability to catch on.

We now have two children, and he is teaching them both how to play music. My daughter at 12 is a musician who plays the ukulele beautifully, so I know it is not his inability to teach that led to my failure, and I could probably say the same for the string of other instructors I tried to learn from after I realized that compatibility in love and marriage doesn’t have to mean compatibility in all aspects of your life…after I realized I was not going to learn to play guitar from Dan.

I tried group lessons. At that point, I had been trying to learn to play for over ten years. The teacher of the course told us that he had taught himself to play three years prior. I went every week, but I walked away with nothing but the same feeling that perhaps I was lacking some innate musical gift that this instructor and most of the other students seemed to have.

I tried individual lessons. My teacher was a kind, pleasant, beautiful musician. We worked together for months on an Indigo Girls song. It is probably not a good sign that I can’t remember which song it was. It was something off of Rites of Passage, most definitely not “Chickenman,” and more likely “Love Will Come To You.”

My teacher invited me to his friends’ studio to record the song, and I reluctantly went because it felt rude to turn down such an offer, but I was confused as to why he thought I was ready for such an experience. His friend looked confused too after he heard my playing. His impatience was visible, and I was uncomfortable as he scrutinized my lack of skill, technical knowledge and inability to cooperate musically. I’m not sure we recorded anything that night.

I kept on with the lessons though. My teacher and I were working on a duet, and he asked me to play at the recital. On the day of the recital, Dan and I argued over something stupid, and I left for the recital alone. I was angry that he would miss my performance. I went to all of his gigs, after all. However, I was relieved when I got there, and I realized that it was a children’s recital. I was the only adult performing. I think the average age of the performers was 7, and most of the kids were better than me. As I rose to take my turn on the stage, I could see their parents eying me quizzically. Not running for the door was one of the bravest things I have ever done.

As I sat down next to my instructor, I caught a glimpse of Dan in the back, smiling encouragingly but also clearly amused. Even though we had argued, he had walked over an hour to come and see me perform with these children. I don’t remember how we sounded or how we were received. I tried to avoid looking at the audience. It mostly went by in an embarrassing blur. The humiliation wore off, but Dan showing up, sticks. And now this is a story we tell our children on the eve of their big performances. How bad can it be? It can’t be as bad as the recital your mom did for an audience of elementary age children and their parents. I let them slip my memory into their back pocket, so they can feel stronger. The story makes me laugh every time, but I imagine that is partly because it can now be told without bitterness or regret because…

I did learn to play the guitar, not by myself, or from my kind teacher who seemed to have no sense of my abilities or social norms for that matter, not from the group classes where everyone seemed to make progress but me and not from Dan who was unable to understand why I couldn’t just listen but loved me anyway.

I learned from Mr. Mark.

Mr. Mark was Anna’s first music teacher, other than Dan. Every week, I drove Anna to his small cozy house in Takoma Park where he had an entire room dedicated to music. Instruments lined the walls, some from around the world, places he had traveled to. Music books filled the shelves along with a few carefully chosen pictures of him performing alone and with other people. In the summer, Seabass, who was three at the time, and I would walk around the neighborhood or to the park while Anna practiced, but when the weather was colder or it was raining, we stayed inside, sitting on Mr. Mark’s couch, reading books and playing with toy cars while Anna practiced. It was in that room on that couch, that I started listening. I listened to Mr. Mark’s pencil scratching the notebook as he recorded the notes and strumming patterns that Anna should follow. I listened as he patiently told Anna to pause and review the strumming pattern before picking back up again. I learned in those moments that music wasn’t just something that could be learned from listening, it could be learned from reading, and reading was something I was good at. It was in the living room of Mr. Mark’s house, listening to my daughter learn song after song that I grew the courage to try again.

At the time, I was tutoring, taking off time from teaching to stay home with the kids. We were careful with our money as we were living off of one income on the outskirts of DC, a place where it was difficult to live off of two incomes. I told Dan that I wanted to take lessons too, and he did what he does every time I share that I want to pursue a passion, he supported my decision. I dropped Seabass off at nursery school every Thursday morning for two hours, which gave me just enough time for a guitar lesson.

Mr. Mark asked me what I wanted to learn, and I said to play and sing songs. He told me to bring in the songs I wanted to learn, and I did. He did the work of translating them, breaking them down into small parts, and then he taught the parts to me. He wrote down chords, formations and strum patterns, and for the first time, I understood.

I tell the story of learning to play the guitar because I truly believe you can learn anything if you have the right teacher, but I also tell this story because of my many attempts and failures that I experienced before learning how to play. I tell the story because of how long it took me to find success. I started this journey as a nineteen-year old college student who lived in New Orleans and didn’t even know how to clean a bathroom much to her roommate’s disappointment. When I finally learned to play, I was a mother of two, a teacher, a homeowner, with a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son. I had learned so many things in that decade and a half, how to become an adult, how to get a job, how to get another job when budget cuts hit, how to mother without mentally breaking down, how to buy and sell a house, how to teach little children, teenagers and adults, and fortunately for my family, how to clean a bathroom, but learning to play the guitar was not on the list. The other day I listened to an interview that Jesse Thorn did with Jay Leno.  Leno tells the story of how his guidance counselor said to his mother. “You know Mrs. Leno, education is not for everyone.” Leno laughs at this story, but this is how some of my students feel. This is how I felt while trying to learn to play the guitar, that perhaps, playing music was not for everyone. I was lucky though, as while I had more than my share of embarrassing moments in my attempts to learn to play music, no one ever said those words to me. My husband, while unable to teach me himself, never stopped believing that I could learn. He never stopped supporting me. My children were my cheerleaders. My parents offered lessons as a birthday gift. This support is built into my core, and this support allowed me the grace and grit to try again after so many failures.

Some of my students have similar support systems. Some of them have people in their lives who believe in them and encourage them to try again when they have failed, but some of them do not. Some of them have been told by their parents that they are stupid and won’t amount to anything. Some have been told that they will never get a job and will end up in jail. When they hear these things, how do they find the courage to pick up and try again?

My husband loves to tell the story of my recital for our children, but he also tells another story about me learning to play. “You didn’t just learn to play guitar because Mr. Mark was a good teacher, you learned because you were a good student. You practiced and worked at it every day.”

And he is right. Mr. Mark met me more than halfway, and I reached back. I sat in our study and listened to Fleetwood Mac upward of 100 times before I learned to play “Landslide.” I asked Dan to play certain songs for me when I had forgotten my lesson, and if I wasn’t following him, I would voice my lack of understanding and ask him to repeat it. Now that I knew that strumming had a recognizable pattern, I would ask him to slow down and show me the pattern he was using, asking specific questions about how many down strums versus up strums he was using. I would then take copious notes. I even asked Anna to teach me some of her songs and to listen to me strumming to see if it sounded right.

I don’t play guitar every day these days. In all honesty, there are sometimes when weeks and months go by, and I have not played at all. I am committed to teaching, writing, reading, gardening, motherhood and my partnership with Dan, and those things fill up my minutes, days and weeks.

Last week at the lake, though, I took my Martin out to the deck. It is mine now. It became mine on the journeys back and forth to Mr. Mark’s house as I carefully lifted it in and out of our trunk. It became mine during the hours we spent together reviewing Mr. Mark’s lessons so I would be ready to move forward the following week. Along with my Martin, I carried a pick and my binder of songs. Unlike Dan, who has hundreds of songs in his head, I still don’t have a single song memorized. But I have my binder which is full of songs I now know how to play. There has been some weather damage to the binder. I am not as careful with my things as I should be, but Mr. Mark’s careful hand is still visible on the pages.  His pencil marks are kind reminders of which strumming pattern to use, which notes to play.

I sat alone and looked at the lake and the mountains in the distance. I played for the squirrels, the crows, the hummingbirds, the deer, but mostly I played for myself. I played John Denver, Sarah Watkins, Fleetwood Mac, Big Star. I played the Indigo Girls. I played songs I had chosen, songs I loved. I knew their names. I knew their strumming patterns, and even though some time had passed since I had last played, I hadn’t forgotten much because the songs had become a part of me. Playing the guitar had become a part of me.

The Indigo Girls often refer to music as transcendence, when the music and the audience and everything merges, when the physical, the rhythms and heartbeat become metaphysical. Playing music is an opportunity to experience something beyond ourselves. Playing for the lake and mountains, I understand this. Playing and singing with my parents on the porch this past week, I savor the gifts I have been given and the gifts I have bestowed on myself.

What resonates with you today? What did you teach yourself? What did someone teach you? Do you have your own experience of performing in a children’s concert or something along similar lines? My cheeks are no longer turning red, but it would be nice to know I’m in good company. I would love to continue this conversation in the comments.

Me and My Dad on Monday