Tonight, for the first time in about five years, I broke out my guitar.
It was dusty and out of tune and the strings are shot, but it took me back to being twenty-two and teaching high school to kids who were almost as old as me.
Suddenly, strumming away, I was back to sitting on a hardwood floor in a rural North Carolina bungalow with my Teach For America friends, playing and singing From A Distance, as if I could ever for a moment sound a thousandth as good as Bette Midler...
...and then to my late-twenties, when WP and I first moved to LA and spent many a long, late (drunken) night strumming and singing and tossing back vodka martinis...
... and into in my early thirties, when all my friends weren't working at the same time, and we'd have game nights in the middle of the week and I'd pick my way through Simon and Garfunkle's "Kathy's Song" on the deck of my friends' house in Silverlake...
... and then, for whatever reason, the guitar got put away.
I just stopped playing.
It's not like I was ever much of a guitarist. I sing better than I play, and I don't sing all that well.
But tonight I remembered that I love playing the guitar.
By the end of the third chorus of Gallileo my callous-less fingertips were stinging. But I kept going through Landslide and Saturday They'll All Be Back (my favorite David Wilcox song).
It felt like a fitting way to say goodbye to my thirties.
I hope my forties find me playing the guitar a heck of a lot more than I have this last decade.
Hmmm....
Maybe what I should get myself for my birthday is a new ax.
C'mon. Your singing is AMAZING. Happy birthday 55 minutes early!
Posted by: @elizabethcraft | 08/24/2011 at 11:06 PM
now this made me smile. happy birthday, sarah!
Posted by: bibi | 08/24/2011 at 11:39 PM
Have a very Happy Birthday!!!
Posted by: Chris | 08/25/2011 at 04:50 AM
Happy birthday! Can't wait to hear what treat you purchased for yourself.
Posted by: Amy | 08/25/2011 at 06:45 AM
Happy birthday! Love you and miss you. Hot Rod says to give his cousin a hug too.
Posted by: Jessica W | 08/25/2011 at 07:09 AM
You must be pretty good if you can remember all those songs off the top of your head after 5 years!
Happy Birthday. Have you unwrapped your present (to yourself) yet!! Spill, what is it?
Posted by: Karen | 08/25/2011 at 07:56 AM
on a card when i turned 40:
The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate
twenty-five-year-old men (Collen MCullough)
female writers do have a way with words...don't you agree?
play dance sing toast enjoy but mainly just be .....God is watching over you
happy day you were born day
Posted by: jerie b | 08/25/2011 at 01:21 PM
Hey sweetie - just caught up with your fabulous news. Hope to get you on the phone one of these days!!!! When I saw the headline on this, the first thing I thought of was how amazed I was that you younguns knew all those songs from my own youth, before you were born. Glad to see you remember that, too.
Happy weekend, happy Thanksgiving, happy belly!
love.
SUSAN.
Posted by: Susan | 11/18/2011 at 06:01 PM