Wait long enough and everything comes back eventually

When I was a kid, any time I asked for something that my mother considered outside the realm of absolute necessity, her standard response was, "You save your money, and when you have enough, you can buy one."

I was in the seventh grade when I decided I needed to play the guitar.  Someone had told me that a classmate of mine played the guitar (it turned out she didn't), and I wanted to be like her so much that I wanted to play the guitar too.  I brought the matter up to my mother who said, "You save your money, and when you have enough, you can buy one."

Well, I saved my money -- my allowance and babysitting money and whatever other sums came my way -- and after months of self-sacrifice, I managed to amass a grand total of $8.50.  That was nowhere near enough to buy a guitar, said the man in the local music store, (the cheapest bottom-of-the-line guitar in the Sears catalogue went for about $20 in those days), but he showed me a ukulele that cost about that much.  I decided to take it.

I brought the ukulele home, along with an instruction book the guy threw in, and tried to figure out how to play it, making my fingers sore but getting nowhere.  I then put the thing in the closet and forgot about it for a year or so.  And then one day when I was a freshman in high school and was supposed to be studying for a Latin test, I got the ukulele out and started fooling with it.  I finally figured out that you don't need to play tunes on it, you just strum chords and sing along.  Once I figured that out, I was off to the races.

From what I see on the Internet and elsewhere, the ukulele might be making a comeback.  I'm ready for it.  I can still bring the house down with my rendition of I Want To Go Back To My Little Grass Shack In Kealakakua Hawaii.