There’s been a guitar – or two – in my life for a half a century.

On a weekend visit from college in the late sixties my big brother brought home the first guitar I had ever handled. He could tell I really liked it. A couple of years later he gave me that guitar!

These kinds of drawings are so weird. I started it with a left hand on a fretboard and no idea of how it would unfold or where it would go. It’s done now, waiting in my camera roll for me to insert it into this post; and now my heart is overflowing with emotional memories.

My brother was a central, nearly heroic figure for me throughout the first ten years of my life; actually, that hasn’t changed. Back then, by the time my periscope was up high enough for me to appreciate him as my brother, he was already making plans to go off to college; oh, and this devastated me. I remember an exchange we had one evening in the nearby church parking lot while shooting hoops. As he outlined some of the highlights of this plan, the football scholarship, the name and location of the university, and so on, I burst in tears and tried my best to put into words why this was all so unacceptable. Looking back, I knew he understood because he found a way to help me understand how I could manage without him between visits home and why it was the right move for him to make at that time in his life.

So when he gave me that guitar, he gave me a part of his heart that has been a part of my heart for fifty some odd years…and counting.

Made with Paper by Firth Three on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil