On my seventh birthday, right after second grade, I asked for a guitar as my gift. My mom took me to the music store at the end of our street and let me pick it out. She also signed me up for lessons. It was great.
I didn’t do anything with it that first week because I had no idea what to do or how to read the music book. My father, who was an accomplished accordionist, offered a little advice but not too much. This was summer, and in summer my dad was on three different softball teams, took two weeks off to go fishing in Canada, and was always distracted by needing to fix one of the two or three cars we had parked in the driveway at any given moment. He barely had time to play the accordion, so I was given a gentle brush off, probably from underneath his AMC Rambler, in between a request to “Hand me that wrench over there…” and “Tell your mother to bring me a cup of coffee.”
The next week, at the appointed time, I grabbed my guitar by the neck with one hand and my lesson book with the other and walked up the street to the music store.
Quick side note about my neighborhood. This was around 1971, and our city was on the southwest border of Cleveland at the corner of Ridge and Memphis, two pretty busy thoroughfares. Along Ridge there was a Lawson’s convenience store, a Snow White donut shop, and a Zenith TV shop. At the corner was a Union 76 filling station. And along Memphis there was a PDQ burger shop, the music store, an auto supply store, and Borzi’s Grocery, run by Mr. Borzi himself. I had no idea how cool it was to have all those shops within a five minute walk, and I would give my left nut to live in a neighborhood like that again.
Across Ridge was a drug store where we could buy toys, baseball cards, and comic books. Next to that was the Trio Tavern where the locals would sit and drink away their lives. God how I miss it!
So I have this first guitar lesson and the instructor, a nice enough woman, showed me how to tune it, how to pick out a few notes, and showed me how to use the lesson book. Then she told me a few things to do before next week’s lesson and off I went, carrying my guitar by the neck, and walked back home.
This being summer, that next lesson happened way sooner than I realized, what with baseball, watching television, and picking up dog poop and rotten apples in the yard, and I didn’t do a thing with the guitar or my lesson when it was time to return.
An hour before the lesson I was a wreck because I couldn’t remember anything she said.
Panicked, I sat through another lesson, but that nice enough woman was kind of pissed at me (can’t blame her) and sent me home with somewhat of a rebuke that I shouldn’t waste her time if I wasn’t going to practice.
When my father got wind of what happened, he was dismissive of the whole thing. “I can teach you how to play guitar. Music is music. You’re not taking lessons anymore.”
That was all well and good except with his busy schedule, and my busy schedule, we never connected about the guitar.
It sat in the corner of the upstairs bedroom I shared with my brothers, gathering dust for years. It got moved to my parents’ new house while I was in college. When I finally bought a house of my own, that guitar made the journey from Ohio to Michigan and took up a place of quiet rest in a closet.
On rare occasions, I’d try to tune it up but the strings broke one by one and, eventually, about ten years ago, I gave it to Elderly Instruments here in Lansing for a three dollar store credit.
By that time, I was into ukuleles, and had finally matured enough to learn how to play an instrument. I’m not great, but decent, as far as ukulele goes. But every once in a while, wanting to play some song I liked, I stumbled into the limitations and compromises you have to make playing a ukulele, which basically has three strings—the G B and E on a guitar—and they’re up a fifth to C E and A (the fourth ukulele string is a re-entrant, high G.)
Anywho, you might recognize a guitar song played on the ukulele, but it’s different. Specifically, I adore the blues, and I really didn’t like how the blues sound on the ukulele.
I wanted a guitar.
I bought one and figured out how to play a scale and started practicing. At first, I surfed around YouTube watching tutorials but quickly realized that is a mad man’s quest. There are more guitar tutorials on YouTube than there are hours left in my life. They all promise to teach you something important, but none of them seem to consider the possibility that the person watching is a rank beginner and will spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to learn what has been tutored.
Hanging around YouTube eventually paid off because one teacher appeared in my feed who spoke to beginners like the frightened finger-picking virgins we are.
If you’ve ever seen The Meaning of Life by Monty Python, there’s a sex education scene in which the instructor and his wife have sex in front of school boys. Horrifying, but effective. That’s what I needed in a guitar teacher.
“Place you fingers here, not there. Putting them there doesn’t help anyone!”
“Lift your arm. It’s in the way.”
“Is that strumming or stroking? Make up your mind or no one will enjoy this.”
Seven months on and it’s going quite well. I’m still playing simple songs, but it’s getting better. To return to my sexual metaphor, I’m in the dry-humping stage of the relationship with my guitar; if I combine singing with playing, I’ll consider it “oral.”
It was a little over 50 years from that day when I asked for a guitar to when I decided I was going to learn. Now—that much older and wiser—I don’t have to be reminded to practice. I don’t kid myself about how much work I need to improve (a lot; I need a lot of work to improve). And I don’t really care what anyone else thinks about my playing, but I do hope to be good enough one day that I can entertain.
Perhaps I’ll play for friends out on the back deck. It’ll be a small group of friends, me a on a rocking chair, and my guitar. My first song will be called: “I got those dry-humping blues.”
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
Unsurprisingly, I’m still working on both novels, but really the past three weeks have been a bit of a blur and not a whole lot of progress has been made. Luckily, there are some group promos and books you can read down below, so keep scrolling…
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Literary Thrillers & Epics – January Reviews
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(Oh well look at that…one of the books available for review is mine.)
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/Brz0O7I
Recommended Reading
Over the holidays, I read two Raymond Chandler novels of the classic tough guy detective Philip Marlowe. Great, entertaining stuff.
I also read a wild novel about a lion called Open Throat by Henry Hoke and started two memoirs, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist and Hell Gate Bridge by Barrie Miskin.
I recommend them all.
Next Picayune
Like it or not, it’s 2026 y’all. Take care of yourself, your family, and your community. We’re going to need each other something awful to keep having this much fun.
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune. All the best,
Mickey
P.S. For those of you who picked up a copy of Ashley Undone recently, nothing helps like reviewing the book. It can be anywhere you’re comfortable reviewing books, and here’s a link to the Amazon page where you can do that if you don’t know anything better. (Thanks in advance.)