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It isn’t easy to believe that another year has expired, and that we are on the eve of 2008. It seems as though 2007 passed in a blur, and could not have possibly been a full 365 days. Still, it was a very good year to me, and one in which I accomplished many a thing I set out to do, and began many another thing I will accomplish by and by. But it is clear I am getting older.

I turned 31 years old in 2007, though for most of the year I was 30, so I think this passage from “Growing Old” by Byron fits well:

But now at thirty years my hair is grey—
(I wonder what it will be like at forty?
I thought of a peruke the other day—)
My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squandered my whole summer while ’twas May[...]

But I, being fond of true philosophy,
Say very often to myself, ‘Alas!
All things that have been born were born to die,
And flesh (which Death mows down to hay) is grass;
You’ve passed your youth not so unpleasantly,
And if you had it o’er again—’twould pass—
So thank your stars that matters are no worse,
And read your Bible, sir, and mind your purse.’

In 1987, when the most garish aesthetic elements of that decade had only just reached their zenith, my father took me to a store on Hillsborough Avenue in Tampa called Paragon Music, where I got a close look at electric guitars for really the first time in my life. I have a vivid recollection of a wall of pointy instruments in obnoxious neon and florescent colors. Not long before, Don Johnson had had a popular music video for a song called “Heartbeat”. At Paragon I saw the same bright green guitar that appears in the video (at about :10). I thought it was the epitome of cool. I do not remember if I was able to actually touch any guitars that day, but my desire to have one of my own was suddenly awakened.

I was only ten years old in 1987, and I certainly had no friends who played guitars, or any instruments, really. But I wanted one so bad that I probably annoyed a lot of people in my lobbying to procure one. That Christmas morning, the only one we spent at Scott Court, I didn’t see an electric guitar under the tree. Remembering that when I was a child, the true meaning of Christmas lay in the receiving of gifts, I was sad. But taking the torn and crumpled paper that had wrapped an assortment of seemingly lesser gifts out to the garbage in the garage I found a small tube amplifier–an Alamo Embassy–and a cardboard box which held an Electra 2253w guitar. I was ecstatic.

Later that morning, before we headed off to see the rest of the family in Dade City, my Dad and I posed for a picture. Twenty Christmases later, at my Grandmother’s house in St. Petersburg, we recreated that historic photograph, with all of us looking a little bit worse for the wear I suppose, including the Electra, which has lost a pickup and sits unstrung in a closet these days. Still, as I lately obsess over white blonde Telecasters, and candy green Stratocasters, I have that old Japanese Fender copy as a tangible reminder of where my interest in playing music–however unaccomplished–began, twenty years ago.