I wonder if this guitar could be my fountain of youth

One problem with being someone who thrives on habit and routine (like me) is that your brain goes largely unused.

When you do the same things in roughly the same order most days, you unwittingly fall into a kind of mental autopilot. All of the books about aging say you need to engage your mind as you get older, whether that means doing puzzles, playing word games, learning a new language or taking up an instrument.

I'm not a puzzle guy, and I can take or leave word games. But the language and instrument options are intriguing.

I once started teaching myself Latin by reading "Latin for Dummies." Maybe I should try that again.

I'm also interested in learning to play something besides the saxophone. I love the sax and have been playing on and off for nearly 44 years (amazingly), but I've often thought about branching out musically.

More than once I've considered the bassoon, which is a beautiful instrument but also a costly one. It's also a double reed instrument, and I'm not sure how well I would adapt to that after decades as a single-reed player.

Plus, I think bassoon music is in bass clef. I choose to believe bass clef isn't real, so that won't work.

One possibility is the guitar pictured above. It's one of four Daisy Rock guitars I won on The Price Is Right, though we won't get into the game show thing yet again.

We sold three of those four guitars on eBay, keeping only this six-string model. I have it here in my home office and will often pick it up and noodle around with it when I'm bored.

"Noodling around" is somewhat limited for me, though, because I only know how to play two chords and can pick out maybe three other tunes. One of those tunes is a piece I wrote many years ago about a toad sitting in the middle of the road. That's a true story.

The problem for me when it comes to the guitar, you see, is that I have small hands. Fortunately, Daisy Rock guitars are somewhat smaller than normal guitars, having been designed largely for young girls.

So while I still don't know what I'm doing, I can at least be confident that when I pick up this particular guitar, it will fit my teenaged girl-sized hands and fingers nicely.

I take this to be a sign that the guitar should be my instrument of choice as I transition into Old Guydom. Playing chords on a stringed instrument feels devilishly difficult to me, but working on it will no doubt keep my brain more engaged than it would otherwise be.

Once I figure out four chords, that's when I will proudly and officially join the ranks of the white-haired guitar geezers.

I'm warning you now in case you come to the blog one day and wonder why I've posted yet another video of me playing Smoke on the Water.

Things I didn't accomplish in 2015

(1) Learn how to speak Latin. This is mostly because, like the guy who complains about not winning the lottery but never actually buys a ticket, I didn't technically study Latin this year. Still, I consider it a failure.

(2) Figure out how to drive a stick shift. Again, I never actually tried doing this, but the fact remains that, as was the case a year ago, I still can't drive a car with a manual transmission.

(3) Spend the time I want to spend with my kids. Yeah, yeah, I have to earn a living to support them and all, which takes a lot of time. There are probably a million excuses I can make. But the fact is I fell short in this area. Again. Gotta do better in 2016.

(4) Write my wife a poem. Or a song or something. I really should do that. I used to make up very Caucasian rap songs about her when we were dating. Like, on the spot. I could improvise quickly. Not so much anymore. That's a skill I ought to dust off because, really, who DOESN'T want to listen to a 46-year-old suburban (read: white) guy rap about his main squeeze?

(5) Read through the Bible in a year. I've only ever actually done this one time, and it was the year 2000. I should be doing this every year. I didn't make it a priority. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also...

(6) Learn to play in the altissimo register on the saxophone. This is a band geeky thing. For you non-musicians – or non-saxophonists, really – the saxophone naturally has a range to high F (some saxes have a key that lets you reach high F-sharp). It's possible to play much higher than that, but you have to learn what is called "altissimo"playing, which is in some ways a very controlled squeak. Something to do with "overtones" and other musical terms. It's difficult but not impossible. Or at least I assume it is, because I never learned it. It's a life goal. I'm going to make it happen.

(7) Run every day. I always say I want to start doing this because I'm inspired when I visit runeveryday.com and read about people who have run at least a mile every day for 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years (two guys actually have streaks of 45 or more years, as certified by the who-knew-they-existed United States Running Streak Association). But my body does not cooperate with this wish. I tear a calf muscle just sitting here thinking about it. I may not have the build ever to actually achieve this, but I'll keep trying.

10 things I always meant to learn how to do but haven't gotten around to yet

1. Be a good bowler

2. Fly a plane

3. Speak Latin (I tried a few years ago)

4. Rewire something...anything

5. Write legibly

6. Dive headfirst into water (or swim, for that matter)

7. Put up a tent

8. Ice skate backwards

9. Drive a stick shift

10. Play bridge

Learning a dead language for no good reason

I'm teaching myself Latin. By reading a book. The book is called "Latin for Dummies." I'm doing it because I thought Greek would be too hard.

Everything in that first paragraph is true. Or, as our ancient Romans friends would have said, "Omnia in illa prima paragraph verum est." I think. My Latin isn't very good yet.

I do a lot of things that no one else would bother doing. Learning Latin from a book is one. Walking 17 miles to work is another. Rooting for the Cleveland Browns is yet another.

None of those activities has a useful purpose, which is why I do them. I remember useless stuff. I engage in useless pastimes. I think about useless things. I am completely useless (or again, as a native Latin speaker would say, "Ego sum prorsus inutilis.")

The problem I'm finding with Latin is that it seems to have little connection with English in terms of word order and verb conjugation. That's probably not entirely true, but I'm early in the learning process and my head is spinning trying to figure out stuff like cases and declensions.

"Latin for Dummies" tries its best to give you Latin phrases you might actually find useful, but that's the problem with a dead language: There are no useful phrases. I don't foresee running into one of the Caesars any time soon, so whatever knowledge I gain in this process is going to be gained for the sake of....well, knowledge.

This is an actual sample conversation offered up on pages 68 and 69 of "Latin for Dummies" (I am not, I assure you, making this up):


PATER (father):  Nepos noster uxorem cupit. ("Our grandson wishes for a wife.")

MATER (mother): Pater filio puellam aptam inveniet. ("His father will find his son a suitable girl.")

PATER: Era difficile fratri meo ubi coniugem filiae suae petebat. ("It was difficult for my brother when he was seeking a husband for his daughter.")

MATER: Sed fratris tui filia est non pulchra! ("But your brother's daughter is not pretty!")

PATER: Screw-us you-us! ("I disagree!") (NOTE: This last line is one that I may actually have made up.)


I'm trying to think of a situation in which knowing these sentences would be useful in any language.

Because that's the general problem with language instruction, isn't it? They teach you all kinds of vocabulary and phrases that are, like me, useless.

I took 14 years of French instruction. That's right, 14 years. Everyone in my school took it from 1st through 6th grade, then most of us continued on in middle school, and a dwindling number continued on through high school.

During my senior year, there were two of us (me and Michelle Dillard) who took the comically unnecessary French V. It wasn't even a class offered during regular school hours. I had to come in at 6:30 on Thursday mornings to take it (by myself...Michelle did it at a separate time) with Madame Whitehorn, a saint of a woman who put up with the 98% of kids who didn't care at all for French to enjoy teaching the 2% who did.

Anyway, I went on to take a few semesters more from the Jesuits at John Carroll University, who at least had the decency to offer up a native French speaker (Monsieur Aube, an aging and hilarious French-Canadian) to teach those of us who tested into 300-level French.

My point is, through all those years of French, I learned maybe four or five things that had any practical value. And by "practical value," I mean stuff I could actually use if I spent any amount of time in Paris.

The French textbooks refused to impart this type of knowledge on us. Instead, they focused on unrealistic classroom situations in which everyone asked for pencils, erased blackboards, and opened and closed doors and windows. And that was about it.

I spent nine hours in Paris once, and not once did I have a need to erase any blackboards or ask anyone for a pencil. I did open and close a few doors, but I didn't bother to inform the Parisians of my door-swinging intentions.

Here are five things that WOULD have been useful to know in French during my short time in Paris, had I figured out how to say them:

(1) "Wait, you're an old woman and you're going to stay here in the men's room cleaning while I stand over there and pee?"

(2) "Really?"

(3) "Because it's awfully hard to pee with you in the room."

(4) "I'm just saying."

(5) "I've missed the last train back to my hotel in London? Is there a particular patch of sidewalk where you would suggest I sleep tonight while I wait for the first train tomorrow morning?"

By the way, I was going to render one of those suggested French sentences in Latin, just to continue the ongoing joke and all. And I realized there was no way I would know the Latin for "pee," so I looked in a Latin dictionary. It turns out the word for "urinate" is "micturio." Finally, something useful!