I have a 12-string guitar that belonged to a musician friend. It was given to me by his widow after he passed away at a young age from cancer in the late 1980s. The guitar had been his constant companion during his travels, from his home country of France, to Hawaii, and beyond. During his illness, the guitar was left out one evening in its case, but the case was not buckled shut, and when picked up, the guitar fell out and snapped at the top of the neck. In gifting it to me, it was hoped I might someday repair and make music with it, carrying on his memory.
A couple of decades later I did an apprenticeship with Dave Keeley, a master luthier in Kettle Falls, so that I could learn how to repair the guitar, and learn something of the craft. Dave’s shop was small and stacked to the low ceiling with raw wood, shelves full of tools, and instruments in various stages of construction and repair. Tucked in here and there were old-fashioned radios and electronic testing gear. And a workbench. It smelled of wood and pipe tobacco and varnish. It was amazing how much fit in that tiny space, yet it was meticulously organized and felt enfolding rather than cramped, like a cocoon where instruments were transformed from the wood.
Building a musical instrument takes time – a lot of time. And I remember one evening, while waiting for a piece to dry, we were talking about how we spend our time. Dave took out his tape measure and, using inches, approximated the average male life-span and then, sliding the tape measure in, deducted his age, average time sleeping, average time at work, and so on, and all the while the extended tape measure got shorter and shorter. This made an impression.
I thought too about the Frenchman whose guitar we worked on, how the measure of his life was cut so short. I thought about how precious and fleeting life can be. And I began what was to become a perennial analysis of how I was spending my own time.
The other day I got to be the one wielding the tape measure in my own shop. It was for my 13-year-old son, who is in a great hurry to be driving and to have a job and an apartment and unlimited access to snacks. After my re-creation of the tape measure experience, I could see that my son was still rattling around, feeling ready for bigger and more, but I think he also heard me because he came back a few days later with a list of goals for this year, things he can do and work toward now. Things that embrace what is here before him rather than the imagined and desired future, representing a shift in focus that allows for seeing the bird of prey in the tree and not just the distant moon framed by the branches.
One of his goals was to climb the mountain beyond our back pasture, solo. And he did it. Looking ahead is important, I would tell him. And so is being in your life, fully, on the way there.
