There was a piano in the parlor of my grandparent’s house. If anyone ever played it, they didn’t do it in front of me. My cousins and I used to bang stupidly on the keys, but that hardly counts as playing. Up in the attic there was a banjo that my Uncle Roscoe once played. At least I think there was a banjo. Maybe Uncle Roscoe once played it, but, if he did, he stopped playing it long before I was around to hear it. In fact, when I was a kid, nobody in my family seemed very interested in music at all. But there was one thing in my grandparent’s house that started me thinking about music. It hung on the wall of the downstairs bedroom, silently casting it’s spell – it was my Uncle Frank’s guitar.
Uncle Frank left it there, and why he didn’t play it, was a mystery to me. It looked just like the ones Roy Rogers and Gene Autry played in the movies. I couldn’t understand how he could leave such a prize behind. It made a sound that I can remember clearly even now – shimmering vibrations, like silvery circles, that rippled through the air, and echoed slowly away. I was fascinated by that sound. It made an impression on me that was as much visual as aural.
Several years later my cousin Donna (Uncle Roscoe’s daughter) made a short-lived attempt to learn Hawaiian guitar. Around the same time, my Uncle Gordon had a brief career as a country-western artist. He sang, but didn’t play guitar, at a Grand O’Opery type of hall in Marshalltown, Iowa. Although he was popular, especially with the young ladies in the crowd, he quit – rather soon after he married my Aunt Iona. Sometime later yet, my cousin Ronnie (Uncle Frank’s son) took up electric guitar and, I believe, learned to play pretty well.
As for me, I was in my twenties before I started playing. Why I waited so long I can’t say, but I haven’t stopped since. I’ve owned a lot of guitars over the years – six string, twelve string, electric, and acoustic, all sorts. Even so, every now and then, I would wonder how it would be to play that old guitar of Uncle Frank’s. A couple of years ago I finally had a chance to find out.
After my parents passed on, my brother and sister and I, and our spouses, got together in Kansas City. Uncle Frank and Aunt Maudine live there, as does my cousin Donna and her family. We all drove up to northern Missouri together, just to visit other relatives, and to see some of the old places. It was a kind of pilgrimage – to honor my mother and father’s memory. It was sad, but it made us feel closer, and I’m very glad we went. At one point we split up, meaning to meet again back in Kansas City for a meal that Karen (Frank and Maudine’s daughter) had planned – just for us. We didn’t make it. It was past `midnight by the time we returned. Karen’s work was in vain, and, we had to catch a plane next morning,
I missed seeing Karen as well. I hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl and now, she was full grown with children of her own. I still feel bad about it.
Despite all that, and the late hour, I did ask Uncle Frank about that guitar. He smiled, and said he had it, but he didn’t think it would be quite the instrument I remembered it to be.
He was right.
It was a perfectly ordinary, not very expensive guitar. Had I run across it in a pawn shop, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. The tuning machines slipped, several strings were missing, and the ones that remained seemed uncomfortably high off the fingerboard. When plucked, it produced a wooden twank. Did I really just imagine the glorious sound it made so long ago, or is it that children hear differently than adults? I don’t know.
Oh well… It doesn’t matter. Uncle Frank’s guitar will always be special to me. The one I remember, that is.
Coda: So why did Uncle Frank keep this not very great guitar around for all these years?
It holds a special memory for him, too.
Uncle Frank grew up on the family farm of his maternal grandfather, Elisha David Alexander – a Civil War veteran of Company D, 51st Infantry, out of Cainsville, Missouri. Elisha was something of a grand presence around Cainsville. He was respected, well-liked, and as one of the oldest Civil War veterans in the region, he was very widely known. Family and friends came from miles about just to celebrate his birthday. He was a man to look up to.
It was he who made possible the purchase of the guitar. And, he did it in a way that gave his 11 year old grandson an opportunity to prove himself with a grown-up responsibility. If Frank would take on the chore of daily maintenance for one of the farm’s calves until it was ready for marketing, half the money it bought at sale would be his. Frank’s half came to 25$, and you know what he spent it on.
That’s how Uncle Frank got his guitar – his first job – and a lasting memory of his grandfather. And, that’s what makes that old, not so great guitar, worth keeping.
Some guitars make music only the heart can hear.
Uncle Frank with his guitar