I don't think about it for long, because I am here for another reason. I need this lesson so that I might not feel this hole as much. This space inside that losing my dad has caused. It's a feeling that I am less than complete and that I am missing something, which is no wonder given that for my entire forty-one years of life I have had a mom and a dad who have loved me. Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage, and my closest supporting characters, the ones who held me as an infant and raised me, now number one fewer. My stage, my world, will never look the same. Friends tell me that years from now I will continue to feel this way The only consolation, they say, is that our best memories of our loved ones have a way over time of making the losses less painful.
It is with the hope for this to happen that we are here. Edward carries with him into the waiting area a black case, and inside it is the tenor guitar that my father bought for him earlier this year. Every time we talked in the months before he died, Dad asked when I might make it by to pick it up. For months I said I would try to find a time. There would always be time, I thought. But then Dad was gone.
As I rushed to Burlington to be by his side before he passed away, I vowed that I would finally get this guitar. I would sign Edward up for lessons. I would honor my Dad. And perhaps I would feel better in time for not having done it sooner.
And here we are.
I know precious little about the tenor guitar, except that it has just four strings, which makes the neck smaller. Dad, a hell of a guitar player in his own right, thought this would make it easier for eight-year-old hands to play. I found on the internet that it's tuned to CGDA, similar to a tenor banjo or mandolin, though I really have no idea what that means. Singer-songwriter Neko Case plays one, as did Scatman Crothers. I know from my dad during our phone calls, those phone calls in which I said I would come by someday, that Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio played one. This no doubt fascinated my dad, because the Kingston Trio's first single was a cover of "Scarlet Ribbons." Dad loved that song, and many nights during my childhood he sang it to me while playing his guitar on the side of my bed. He used to love to sing me to sleep.
Though I do not have the musical talents my dad had, I did inherit his love of the bedtime lullaby. I sang hundreds of songs to my children over hundreds of nights before laying them gently back in their cribs. Even after they moved from their cribs to their big kid beds they wanted me to sit beside them and sing.
But they're older now, and they ask for me to sing far less frequently. Perhaps they realize I don't have that great a voice. Or perhaps it's just not cool. So on the rare night when Edward asks, I am more than happy to oblige. On these nights, with a sleepy voice, he requests the one song he loves the most from the many songs he's heard since the earliest of his days. "Blackbird," by the Beatles.
Edward's teacher finds us in the waiting area, and after brief introductions he takes us back to a private room. It is here where Edward's musical career will begin, but more importantly it is here where I will begin to fill the void.
As Edward opens the guitar case his teacher asks about the songs, and Edward tells him he wants to learn "The Star Spangled Banner."
"We didn't come up with another one," I add. I consider whether to offer excuses for our failure to do so, but then Edward surprises me.
"And I want to learn 'Blackbird'."
This is when I realize I'd wanted this lesson for reasons that were all wrong. I cannot help that I thought there would always be more time. I cannot change the past, and I cannot rush the healing process. I can only hope to remember to make the best of the moments we have and to accept the gifts that such moments bring. I needed this lesson to remind me of that.
As I look at Edward, with his guitar in his lap, I picture him sitting on the sides of his own children's beds one day. He is playing the guitar and singing them to sleep with their favorite bedtime songs.
I watch him, and I can feel that this space inside is now not quite as big.