My Practiced Mid-Life Passion
Many passions I have had
and many I have practiced long and hard.,
but it was not until mid-life, I opted for a hobby more artistic.
I got myself a new guitar with books to teach myself the chords.
Quickly I realized I lacked ability to teach myself!
So I found a woman who gave lessons in her home,
and once or twice a week I went to see her.
She taught me several chords and many kinds of strums.
I learned new things like what frets were and how to tune my strings!
The woman sent me home each week to practice a few songs:
John Denver, the Beatles (I loved Rocky Raccoon).
She loved country music and I’ll never forget my practice of Elvira.
All those songs I kept in binders. They kept accumulating.
Though I kept trying to review them all, I just could not keep up.
Two years passed. My binders were bursting
with the songs I now could play!
My children can attest to my diligence as night after night after night,
I sat there at the table plucking away with calloused fingers,
sometimes struggling over the more difficult songs to get them right.
But often I sang happily, so proud to know that I was actually
accompanying myself with my guitar!
I made some tapes and sent them out to family
so they could hear me, quite the amateur, strumming Christmas tunes.
Alas! My guitar days were a phase that fizzled out.
At least for two or three years, I gave it my all
and sometimes even summoned up the courage
to play the easiest of folk songs for my students.
Playing for an audience, though, I would find my poor hands shaking.
Often I would falter. I just could never seem to reach my full potential.
A few years later, poetry would come to me.
Though I had loved guitar, I could never play by ear.
I’d have to have the chords right there in front of me
to know what I should play.
Not so with poetry. Poetry has forms.
Practicing the different forms, I can get better and better.
It’s much more natural for me than playing the guitar.
With poetry, I am able to progress and feel successful.
Last year, I picked my old guitar up and dusted it off.
Thirteen years had passed since last I played it!
I laid my fingers on the strings and barely could remember
the simplest of the notes and how to play them!
Melancholy swept through me, to think of the many hours
I’d practiced and practiced every night!
Now I barely could recall those basic chords and magic strums.
As I tried to tune that old guitar,
a feat that I had never quite perfected,,
I tightened and tightened one stubborn string until at last
it snapped!
And with that SNAP, my heart broke too,
for the snap was like an omen.
It said to me I’d never really ever play again.
Too consumed with too many other things,
I put my old guitar back in its case, and there it sits today,
a reminder of my mid-life passion which consumed me for a time
til poetry’s sweet music replaced it so naturally!
Copyright © Andrea Dietrich | Year Posted 2016
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