After Dad passed I got it in my head I was finally going to learn his guitar. Sixty-one years old, never once picked one up, but he played on the porch every Sunday my whole growing up, and it seemed like the right way to keep a little of him in the house. Old Gibson. Lived in a beat-up case in the hall closet far back as I can remember, up here in Kalispell.
Brought it out to the kitchen table where the light is good. Popped the latches and that smell come up out of the case and about put me on the floor, old wood, and somehow still a little of his pipe under it all. My wife came and stood in the doorway and neither of us said anything.
Thing is, Dad was funny about that guitar. A kid comes to the porch wants to hold it, no. Grandkids, no. He would play it two hours for you happy as anything but he did not hand it over, and if you pushed he would just latch it up and that was Sunday done. We all figured it was a fussy-old-man thing about his one nice possession. You do not argue a man out of his one nice thing.
So I go to see about maybe a lesson book, and I notice the lining in the lid of the case is loose down one corner, peeling. I put a finger under to press it back, and it lifted more than it should, and there was something flat tucked up behind it, been there long enough the felt had taken the shape of it. I worked it out from under the lining and set it on the table under the good light. And I set the guitar down careful and got down on the kitchen floor myself.
It was a photograph and a letter. The photograph was Dad, young, maybe thirty, on that same porch with that same guitar, and a baby on his knee grinning up at him. Me. And the letter was in his hand, dated the year I was born, and it was addressed to me.
Son, if you are reading this, then I am gone and you finally picked her up, which means you needed me and I could not be there to say it. So I said it in here, years ago, and hid it where only you would find it. Every Sunday I played was me telling you I loved you. I never had the words out loud. The guitar had them for me. She is yours now. So are all the songs.
That is why he never let a soul hold it. Not fussiness. He had a letter to his boy hidden in the lining, waiting on the day I would grieve him enough to want to learn, and he could not risk somebody finding it before me and spoiling it.
My whole life I thought my father was a quiet man who loved a guitar more than he could say he loved us. Turns out he loved us more than he could say, and the guitar was how he said it, every single Sunday, and I was too young and then too busy to hear it.
I am learning her now. Sixty-one years old, fumbling the chords at that kitchen table, and my wife says on a quiet evening it near sounds like him. I hope it does. I have got fifty years of Sundays to answer, and only one way he left me to do it.