Merry Christmas

Today is Christmas day. I'm a Bahá'í and I don't do much for the Christmas thing. It's not that I don't celebrate, because I do believe in Christ as a Messenger from God Whose title is the Son of God. But as far as the whole tree and presents and what has come to be the typical Christmas stuff... not interested.
This has nothing to do with my blog today though. Just thought I'd mention that since it's Christmas today.
I started playing the guitar a while ago ago. In March 2002 after the Fast I bought a Takamine guitar from Adrian Green. It had belonged to Salman before that, so it was kind of mailroom guitar. It sounded really nice and was easy to play. I started doing some online lessons, and got together with Saman and David once a week for Wednesday night guitar night, which started with very high aspirations of guitar lessons, but it being me David and Sam, what generally happened was, David would show up, with or without his guitar. Sam would show up with hers. David would play around and show us something new he had done. Show us as in play it for us, not so much teach it to us... I would cook dinner while Sam played the latest Ben Harper song that she'd learned from tab. After dinner David would give us some impossibly difficult exercise to do to improve our skills (which were nonexistent at the time). After abuot 10 minutes of that we would get bored and start talking about what movies were in cinemas, and usually within 45 minutes we'd be sitting in the movie theatre. If not, we'd be in Ahuza or Ben Gurion or in the Hadar at a cafe drinking something yummy and laughing (sin guitarras, by the way). So that was class. Despite not really learning how to play anything at "class", we all agreed that it inspired us to play better. Sam and I would look at David's fingers in awe as they seemed to move effortlessly along the strings, and of course, we would practice during the week so that when Wednesday rolled around, we would have harder, bigger callouses on our left hand from the guitar strings. And if that's not proof of guitar playing, what is?
I've been playing the violin since I was 6. Well not really. I started with the viola. Well not really. The viola is bigger than a violin, and I was a small child, and there weren't really half size or 3/4 size violas, so what they did is take a full size violin and put viola strings on it and voila! Viola! At some point, I don't quite know when, I, for some reason wanted to play violin instead. I think I thought violin was cooler. So then I got a full size violin, which, oddly enough, felt just like a 3/4 size viola! Geesh. Anyway, the result is that for years I played the violin in various orchestras and stuff, and later picked up the viola again. I love playing the violin (and viola) although if you had spoken to me when I was 14, I'd be singing a different tune. I thank my parents often (in my head anyway, maybe not to their faces) for not having let me quit when I wanted to. And I often encourage parents of children who are playing instruments also not to let them quit. I can't tell you how many adults I've spoken to who said "I used to play .... (insert any instrument here).... I wish I had kept it up". Not one person have i ever met who said, "I played the .... I'm glad I quit." or "I'm an accomplished ....ist, I really should have quit."
But I digress.
Just before I went to Haifa I was in a band in Bermuda, F Natural. We had fun. We played songs, those guys were good. They encouraged me to sing. We took a poem I had written and put it to music. Performing on the stage for the first time, singing, was the scariest thing I have ever done in my life. Playing the violin has absolutely nothing on it. I didn't know what butterflies were until I stood there on that stage about to start. But although I didn't particularly like that song, or the melody, or even the poem very much, I liked the thought of singing, even if the actual act of it scared the crap out of me. All my life I've played an instrument that I can't sing with (unless you count the background "Lahs" I sang with Aube Mystique, our band in Montreal). With F Natural, I realised that there are songs in my head that I want to sing and play, and there is no way I could express how I hear the music, not with a violin. So I decided to learn the guitar.
Other than the Wednesday night session and the free online lessons, I have tried to avoid formal training. I prefer to get tips from friends like David and Eric, and more recently Hector and Riaz. I don't have a particular style, I love learning Tracy Chapman, Ben Harper, and Jason Mraz songs. I hate when I'm playing and people start saying "can you play...." because the answer will surely be no. I'm not interested in learning other people's songs so I can play in a group at campfires. The reason I'm learning guitar is to hear out loud the songs I hear in my head.
Now I have 3 songs that I can consider complete that I've written... "The Bubble Song", "The Free Will Song" and "Is That Enough?". It makes me happy. I'm doing what I want to do with my guitar.
A word about my guitar. Last February, I decided to give my guitar to my father. He had started singing and was discovering his voice. He was also writing poetry again and doing some amazing stuff. His instrument of choice is the drum and he plays really well while singin, which is a feat in itself! He was starting to write Calypso songs and I thought that I'd give him my guitar, so he could have the independence and freedom to put his own music to them. I remember the frustration I felt when I had a song in my head and was trying to explain to a guitarist friend how it should sound. The frustration was not just on my part, because it takes a lot of patience be told that instead of "frrrrink" you should be playing "flllleeeng", which were the only types of words that I could use to describe what I now realise are really simple guitar chords.
I taught Dad E some chords, but he didn't seem interested. I left the guitar with him anyway, just in case, and maybe one day he will learn, if only to be able to show people what he wants played in accompaniment, but his drum thing is really working for him, so if worst comes to worse, we'll have 2 nice guitars around. But since I was guitarless in February, I set about shopping for a new one. I didn't find anything I wanted within my pice range in Canada, so I went back to Haifa and the search continued. Eric was my patient, indulgent sidekick in the guitar quest, that led me to all of Haifa's malls and repeated visits to the Glass Mall in the Hadar. Funny enough, it was there, in the music store where I had been buying supplies for 2 years, that I found it. I had a strong feeling that there was a guitar out there that was "My Guitar" and my job in the shopping was to find it. This one called out to me from the rack where it stood, and after negotiating a great price, waiting for the next order to come in with the right colour, there it was.
Now, almost 2 years later, I love my guitar even more. We spend a lot of time together and it is helping me to be able to share the songs that are in my head, and it's really an added bonus for me that other people actually like the songs as well.
Now I have to work on my singing....