I tipped the guitar and shook the thing out of the sound hole into my palm and unfolded the yellowed paper it was wrapped in, and I had to lay the guitar down across my knees and just breathe, because my father, who I never once knew to write a word beyond a grocery list, had written a song.
It was sheet music, hand-drawn, the staff lines wobbly, the notes careful. And under the notes, words. Lyrics, in my dad blocky print. A whole song, verses and a chorus, and at the top he had written a title, and the title was my name.
I sat on that porch and I read it, and then I picked out the melody on the new strings, slow, and I knew it. I knew it in my bones before my fingers even found it. It was the tune my daddy played every single evening of my childhood, the one I always thought was just some old song he liked, the one I fell asleep to a thousand nights through the wall. He wrote it. For me. When I was a baby who would not sleep, the paper said, he made up a song to quiet me, and he played it every night for eighteen years, and he never once told me it was mine.
Wrote this the year you were born, when nothing else on earth would settle you but the sound of it. I never was much good with words to your face, so I put them here, where maybe someday you would find them. This song is you, son. It always was. Every night I played it, I was telling you I loved you. I hope you can hear it now.
That was why he never let me change the strings. Take the strings off and clean out the body, and your hand finds the paper, and he was not ready, all those years, for me to find it yet. He wanted it to wait. He wanted me to find his heart in that guitar when the time was right, which turned out to be a porch, twenty years after he died, with my own boy about to learn to play.
So here is what I did. I did not teach my son some beginner song out of a book. I taught him his grandfather song, only I sat up that night first and I wrote my boy into it, a new verse with his name, the way my father wrote me into it. Four generations of that melody now, and my son does not even know yet that his granddaddy made it up in the dark to quiet a crying baby who grew up to be me.
He will know though. When he is grown, and he takes those strings off someday to change them, he is going to find the paper right where I put it back, in the body of the guitar, his verse and mine and my daddy very first one, and he is going to understand that this whole family has been singing each other to sleep with the same song of love for a hundred years. My father could not say it out loud. So he sang it. And now, so do we.