The first guitar I ever saw was in my grandparents’ basement. It had belonged to my uncle who died in World War II and had probably not been touched after he left for the army. I found it one day when I was playing down there, and although I was only about four or five years old, I managed somehow to prop the dusty old thing up on a chair. I remember standing there brushing one finger across the strings and thinking how cool it would be if I could actually play it. Completely out of tune, possibly with strings missing, it must have sounded dreadful, but I was enthralled. Playing the guitar was a little wish that I kept in the back of my mind for years.
In the sixth grade, I met a girl named Chrissie Sherman who was way too cool -- smart, popular, athletic, good looking – everything I wasn't but wanted to be. I wanted, in fact, to be just like her in every way. Then somebody told me that Chrissie Sherman played the guitar. That put me over the top.
Despite my parents having strained the family budget to buy a piano and give me lessons, I started asking for a guitar. As always in such circumstances, my mother said, “Well, you save your money, and when you have enough, you can buy one.” It was her way of approving a scheme without committing to pay for it.
I started saving every penny I could, mostly from my allowance, and in a year or so I took myself into our local Olsen’s Musicland and announced I had come to buy a guitar.
Mr. Olsen asked me how much I had to spend, and when I told him proudly that I had $8.50, he said that a guitar would cost about three times that much. A dream crushed! At that rate, I’d never be able to save enough to buy a guitar and be like Chrissie Sherman.
Aware of my disappointment, Mr. Olsen said, “I do have a ukulele that costs $8.50. How about that instead?”
Assuming that any stringed instrument with frets was close enough, I bought the little Harmony uke and took it home.
Armed with a “Ukulele Ike” book Mr. Olsen had thrown in, I managed to get the thing tuned. The songs in the book, however, gave me melody and words and chords, but what I knew about playing music on the piano did not translate. And it made my fingers sore. After a couple days, I put the thing in the closet and left it there.
I came across the ukulele a couple years later, and one evening when I was supposed to be doing my Latin homework, I took another crack at it, and this time it made sense. I was to strum the chords to accompany myself as I sang the tune. Duh.
I had a lot of fun playing that little ukulele. When I was in high school, my folks bought me a baritone uke for Christmas. It was 1962, and guitar-playing folk singers were all the rage. A baritone ukulele is just like a guitar that's missing two strings, so I had no trouble learning to play the guitar too, always somebody else's. In fact, I carried on playing borrowed guitars until 1967 when I finally bought one of my own.
One afternoon in the early 1970’s while I was sitting alone playing my guitar, it hit me for the first time that here was a dream that had actually come true. I remembered how often and how hard I had wished that I could play the guitar, and here I was doing it, and doing it pretty well.
I guess I owe it all to Chrissie Sherman, who, I found out later, did not and never had played the guitar at all.
