It was Christmas, a time of joy
and celebration for families everywhere. Our large, musically oriented
family blessed with not one, but two new guitars, knew joy beyond measure, as
we received the instruments and guitar instruction books that came with them
for Christmas.
There were no guitarists in our
family or community, so there was no guitar teacher either, but one after
another, several older children learned the basics of guitar.
One guitar was a beautiful,
brown acoustic
guitar set up to play chords. It came with a chord book. The other, a blue, Hawaiian ‘lap’
guitar, tuned to one chord, had a metal bar that slid up and down and a
songbook. There were no cases.
Tuning the guitars was no
problem, because our mother was a gifted pianist with a piano in the house.
Learning guitar chords and
basic fingering on the acoustic guitar demanded manipulation of hands, wrists
and fingers. For small hands, it proved awkward and frustrating. Learning to
strum and do fingering with a pick, required good hand-eye motor co-ordination,
but took a lot of practice and patience. Wet salt toughened up sore fingers.
Several children never learned
to play guitar, but saw the guitar as a treasure they wanted to own as a
personal possession Learning to sing along was
another challenge, but all the children loved singing. As the older children
mastered basic guitar chords, the younger children were enthralled singing
nursery rhymes and songs they knew. Thus, our home was always full of music,
imperfect at best.
One child played the Hawaiian
guitar, while even the younger children struggled to learn basic guitar chords
and fingering, on the acoustic guitar. Over the years, several members
of the family developed better acoustic guitar skills than their older
siblings. Guitar instruction books were expensive. Not every child could learn
guitar, but most learned to play at least one instrument of some kind. Music rang out joyfully,
Christmas after Christmas.
The old, acoustic guitar is now
the prized possession of a family member who learned to play it. What happened
to the Hawaiian guitar, no one really knows. Other family members strum away
on their own guitars at their leisure and one person plays bass guitar
professionally.
Such is the gift of the love of
music, at the heart of the miracle of miracles.
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