My first guitar bore, as badge of its possibly dissipated former life, the ring a bottle might leave on a polished table top.  At fourteen, I was sure it had been a beer bottle.

Bought by my father for ten dollars from a musician buddy, it came strung backwards, left-handed, a practical obstacle. Maybe Dad thought that scarred Stella acoustic (like Leadbelly played, though that would have meant little to me then) would prove daunting enough in its pure obstinate difficulty to put me off the whole idea of guitar-playing.  He loathed rock and roll, though my mother had smuggled my first Elvis record into the house.

The Stella’s neck was so warped I could barely muster finger-strength to press strings to frets, but I was determined, and developed an iron grip to wrest rudimentary chords from that hard-luck box.

I and three fellow acolytes of the new British sound taught ourselves and each other the songs of the tribe that had chosen us. I saved money from my after-school newspaper job for a Hagstrom electric, but toted the Stella to the park summer evenings to serenade camper girls lured away from their parents, conditions of appropriately Troubadour-like unfulfillment.

Graduation scattered us four co-conspirators after too short a time passing the cup of harmony. Still the Stella stuck with me for years, the husk of a dream, from dorm to crashpad, until I unintentionally abandoned it moving out of a hippie farmhouse where I lived the winter the Beatles’ White Album publicly revealed their fracture.  

I’ve regretted the carelessness, and wondered what became of my sturdy, resonant companion. Did it end in some attic, decayed glue releasing the high tension of its neck? Or has it docked in other ports, still delivering its cargo of romantic possibility? Does some fresh beginner even now painstakingly spell out on its raised strings the familiar truncated alphabet of desire?

Thomas R. Smith lives in River Falls and teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He enjoyed an unhurried childhood in Cornell beside the Chippewa River and frequently returns to the area for material and inspiration. Visit him online at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com