Christmas of 1997 I asked my parents for a guitar, and they got me one.
I was halfway through my sophomore year, home for the break. I opened the box and I was genuinely thrilled — right up until I got my hands on the neck. It was a beginner’s three-quarter model, and my hands are not small hands.
I remember working very hard at not seeming ungrateful. Dad, this is awesome, I said, I just — I can’t get my fingers where they go.
He said, well, how about we take it back and see what we can find.
My uncle ran a music store in Duncan. We drove it over, got the money back, and he put a Jasmine in my hands — Takamine’s beginner line, full size, light face and darker wood on the sides. Pretty guitar.
Next year I’ll have had it thirty years. It hangs on the wall right inside my office door and I tuned it up this week and it still sounds right. I’ve written twenty or twenty-five songs on it.
I never got any good in the way people mean when they say good.
I started a guitar class in college and it didn’t take, mostly because it was aimed at lead playing and I didn’t want to play lead. I wasn’t trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to play rhythm, sing, and write my own things, and for that you need chords and patterns and a feel for it, which I taught myself over about three decades.
What stuck wasn’t skill. It was the instrument.
We used to run a booth in an antiques mall, which meant a lot of Saturdays at estate sales looking for things to resell. Some of it we sold. Some of it stayed.
I don’t remember whose house it was. I’ve been to too many. But I walked in and there was a guitar sitting in a hard case, and normally I look right past guitars at these things — the classicals with the dead nylon strings, the corroded wire, the wood that’s been dry in a closet for twenty years.
This one was clean. Solid. Still roughly in tune, which tells you something about whoever had it. I picked it up and it was playable right there in a stranger’s house.
Seventy-five dollars. It’s a Ventura — designed in the States, built in Japan, and the name doesn’t exist anymore as far as I can tell. From what I’ve been able to piece together it was made before I was born.
It hangs next to the Jasmine. Those two are the featured wall in my office, and the Ventura is the one I actually reach for. Lightest strings of anything I own, so it doesn’t hurt my fingers, and the tone on it is rich in a way I didn’t pay for.
Somebody kept that guitar in shape for fifty years and then it came to my house.
I collect a few other things.
Six guitars. Thirty-some pipes, including a Gandalf one my wife gave me one Christmas, because I’ve always loved the stories about C.S. Lewis being absent-minded enough to set his own jacket pocket on fire. A couple hundred records — Bob Seger’s on the player right now. Comic books from years ago, up on a shelf. Cast iron, eight pans in the oven and another twenty-five out in the garage I haven’t gotten to since we moved. Cookbooks, for a project I haven’t started.
And books. Enough books that my wife has, over the years, gently suggested some of them could go. I rearranged them until they fit instead, which she let me get away with.
On our twentieth anniversary we were in Fredericksburg, Texas, and found a charity thrift store with a complete set of the Harvard Classics — the five-foot shelf, early 1900s, all of it. Twenty-five dollars. They sit on top of the china cabinet in my office.
Here’s the honest part about the books, and it took me a while to say it out loud. I’ve read maybe half of them. The rest I know about. I’ve read summaries, I could tell you the argument, I keep them where I can see them.
That’s knowledge near me rather than in me, and I know the difference.
There’s one more thing on my walls and I didn’t acquire any of it.
My son paints and draws. I’ve got eight of his pieces hanging in this office — I can see all eight from where I’m sitting. Drawings and oils.
I’ve told him I’m his collector. That’s the word I use for it, and I meant it as a joke the first time, and then I kept saying it.
Everything else in this room I went and found. Estate sales, thrift stores, a music store in Duncan in 1997. All of it was finished before it got here — somebody else built the guitar, somebody else bound the books, somebody else played the Ventura for fifty years, and I’m the one who came along afterward and put it on a wall.
His are the only ones where the collection isn’t done yet.
David Willis 