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Guitar | Nov 09 2006

I played a guitar today for the first time in many years. K’s nephew, a musician, is visiting from Chicago, and he left two guitars in the hall. This morning, after he’d left for the day, I decided to try one. It was a better guitar than I’ve ever played, one worth several thousand dollars—not that I could tell the difference.

To my surprise, I found I’ve forgotten all the songs I ever wrote. Parts of some came back, a smattering of verses and choruses, but I couldn’t play a single song from start to finish. I’m also down to just four chords: Am, Em, G, and C.

I’ve never counted, but I believe I written at least 25 songs on the guitar, some of which were good. I say were because they’re gone now—or most are, the only exceptions being the handful I recorded. A few get played by friends (or once were), so these can probably be recovered, but the rest are lost, likely forever.

What’s interesting in this is how little it matters to me. I used to hold on more, I used to try to preserve things—letters, photos, mementos. However, during my last apartment move, I trashed several boxes of such items, recognizing that I hadn’t opened them, or even thought of opening them, in over a decade.

I’ve come to think of this as a storage problem. The older I get, the more past there is to try to save… while my capacity for storage—both physical and emotional capacity—diminishes, in seemingly equal measure.

Holding on is a losing strategy. Not that there’s any winning strategy, of course.