rhapsodic.org is a weblog by Valette Keller

A girl and her (husband's) guitars

Last night, as I am periodically prone to do, I grabbed Melissa's old cheap acoustic guitar and demanded of B, "Show me a chord or something."

You see, I know just about nothing about guitars. I can tune them to a pitch fork or a piano or another guitar because I have pretty good pitch. And I understand quite a bit about music in general: 14 years of piano and a continued interest in percussion helps immensely. But actually getting them to make beautiful music? Forget it.

He showed me a chord or two or twelve. Johnny Cash's Hurt came on and B tried to show me how to switch from one chord to another.

I realized that my fingers are girly and wusses. Not only were they complaining about the thin wire digging further and further into their tender flesh, but they also decided they were not going to bend into the contorted positions known as chords.

And then there was the G chord. Blessed G major. I became the Master of Disaster of the G chord, and sat around waiting for Johnny-boy to get to it, which was hardly ever. But once he did, I rocked along with the best of them.

B kept doing a whole bunch of fancy sexy stuff, like C chords and A minor, and I got lost. Quickly. Instead of giving up completely, I grabbed our bass.

Anyone know why we own a guitar that neither of us knows how to play? Me neither. I have tried off and on to learn it, but the books are silly and boring and as bad as piano theory books.

But the beauty of a bass guitar is that you only play one note at a time, and the strings are bigger so they don't dig into your prissy fingertips. Watching B's hand, I was able to figure out the song he was playing.

And then we jammed. We played through Hurt and Glycerin and a few others that he knows and I don't. It was euphoric, it was awesome. And I fell in love with him again.