I cannot play the guitar.

I cannot play the guitar, and it’s my own fault.  I outsmarted myself.

Now, it is possible I was never going to be able to play the guitar well.  Maybe I didn’t have the dexterity in my fingers or the musical ability.  I certainly don’t have much of an ear.  (Digital guitar tuners.  A most excellent invention!  I really like this one.)

I do, however, have enough of an ear to love music. I bought myself a guitar when I was a teenager, along with a book entitled something highly original like “How to Play the Guitar.”

I learned some chords.  About six, I think.  Maybe seven.  C, F, Dm, D, Am, Em, G7.  I learned to strum.  I learned to pick out a melody.  (I can still play the first nine notes of “Dueling Banjos.”  Not a lot of call for that, believe it or not.  Go figure.)

I spent hours warbling away with a collection of music books, a guitar pick and extremely sore fingers.  And I mean hours!  It’s a wonder my parents didn’t kill me.  Fortunately, it seems that my noise sensitivity is not inherited.  Not from them, anyway.  We survived this period.

I still have the guitar, the music books and the picks.  And a great admiration for guitar players.

But I cannot play the guitar.

One of the reasons I never got beyond those six or seven chords is that I picked up a book or an article somewhere about transposing.  And suddenly, I didn’t have to learn any additional chords in order to play all those songs I hadn’t yet mastered.

(Wow!  That is looking back through rose-colored glasses for sure.  As if I had ever mastered even one song.)

Let us pause for a moment, in the interest of honesty, and amend that ‘songs I hadn’t yet mastered’ to ‘songs written with chords I didn’t yet know.’

Suddenly, I didn’t have to learn any additional chords to play accompaniment for any song in the books.  I spent hours working out the transposition and penciling the new chord symbols into my music.  I mean hours.  I thought I was so smart to have figured that out.

I wonder what would have happened if I had spent those hours learning and practicing the new chords.