Duet by Kitty Burns Florey

Author:Kitty Burns Florey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Armory New Media
Published: 1987-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

I surprised myself with the guitar. I mastered it in record time—at least, I learned enough basic chords to accompany some basic songs. I sat in my room all that weekend singing and strumming. My first real victory was “Pop Goes the Weasel,” in honor of Freddie—mostly G and D chords, with a short trip into C and a quick A minor that I was proud of. I tried a combination of picking out the tune on the strings and filling in the rhythm with chords, and it worked pretty well on “Pop Goes the Weasel,” but I got into trouble with “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” my second attempt. The chords were simple, but the song—another Freddie favorite—had too many notes, and I got confused trying to combine them with chords. I kept thinking, If I could just have one lesson with somebody like the lost Gary (who was probably standing downtown in an unemployment line smoking his furtive joint), if somebody could just show me a couple of basic techniques, I could be pretty good by Tuesday morning, in a primitive kind of way.

But I kept at it on my own, all that weekend and into Monday. I remembered a lot of the good old songs my sisters and I used to sing when we were kids. On car trips the three of us would belt out “Red River Valley” and “I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Loaded” until my father would yell “Hört doch endlich auf!” Then, when Freddie was born, it gave me an excuse to sing them all again. He loved to be sung to, loved to sing along. All that long guitar-playing weekend, I thought about Freddie. What was he doing? Was he playing with Laramie, was he playing outside, was he rolling cheese slices into tubes, was he still crazy about light switches? I sat in my old bedroom surrounded by the junk of ages—St. Joseph’s Academy banner on the wall, schoolbooks, and baseball cards and a pile of faded game boxes on the closet shelf, my ancient record player (broken) and a stack of old 45’s. Elvis, the Shirelles, the Everly Brothers, Duane Eddy and his twangy guitar. I thought once how funny it was that so many elements from so many parts of my life were there together in that shabby bedroom: Chutes and Ladders, Willie Mays, Freddie, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Bye Bye Love,” Amsco Review Book for Latin II, my sisters singing in the car, and me picking out chords on the Grace Hill Nursery guitar—all of it mixed up together, all of it present in the old songs I tried to play.

I had a whack at almost everything I knew, and when I forgot the words, I hummed or played the guitar louder. I was probably driving my mother crazy, although she was full of encouragement and compliments. Finally, on Monday morning, I took my sore fingers outside to rake leaves, but I kept thinking about the guitar, the songs kept going through my head, and I never did finish the backyard.

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