My guitar

Sometime in the early 80s, a ball bounced into a fenced-in electrical converter or somesuch thing in Durham, NC, and a boy went in there after it. He died. This was Anderson Cole, the sole child of my godparents, my father's first law partner Jim and his wife Mary. Their marriage didn't outlast the accident by too long.

Soon thereafter, Jim (or was it Mary) gave me a guitar. In my mind's eye, it was Anderson's guitar, though I don't know if that was true or just mythology. It's a Gibson C-1 classic, which I always thought was a good thing until I asked a repairman recently and he said that, unlike Gibson electric guitars, this is crap and not worth spending money on fixing.

But it's my guitar, and it's the only one I've ever had. It now has a crack in the body, which drove our dog Story crazy before he too, passed away. Some packing tape on the back dims the vibrations. If it seems that there's much death in this story, it's because I've had it for so long and it, as a sheltered inanimate object, might just outlive us all. I've considered getting another one, but never pull the trigger. I'd say the fretboard was an extension of my body if my relative clumsiness with it didn't undermine the metaphor.

I hadn't been playing much, until the Scorsese documentary on Dylan inspired me. I used to play some for the infant Natalie when Mary was away teaching on Mondays, but she or Story invariably started crying. Graham's a little more into it, thought he fancies himself too much the strummer at his tender age.