A Room of One's Own

 

When Terry and I were first married in 1992, one of the upstairs rooms in our house was designated "the computer room," but it was in most respects really "Scott's room."

Oh, we both used it, but I was the one who "decorated" it, if you want to call it that. It had hockey and music posters on the wall. It featured stuffed Bill the Cat and Opus dolls from my favorite comic strip of the time, "Bloom County." It had a little nook in which I placed the Yamaha keyboard on which I would doodle from time to time.

As I was just 22 years old at the time, it was in some ways the college dorm room I never had.

It was the only room in the house over which I had (or wanted) any real say when it came to what we put there and how it looked.

Fast forward 33 years to our current house and this tradition of giving me one room to play with has continued. Terry uses our upstairs office all the time, but most of the stuff there is mine.

There are, for example, three bookshelves to hold my personal library, including this one devoted largely to my military history books:

And on top of that is a little shrine to our dearly departed cats Fred, George and Charlie:

The music theme continues in this little corner with the inclusion of two instruments (a keyboard and guitar) that I technically cannot play, though that never stops me from trying. Note that the room also contains my alto saxophone, which for the record I can play.

On the walls are various photos reflecting my interests, from a large autographed image of Sting to an autographed Lake Erie Monsters (our local hockey team, now called the Cleveland Monsters) layout. I also have a map of the Appalachian Trail and these two pictures of my mom and dad presumably taken on Parents Night when I played high school football:

Above those are my undergraduate and graduate school diplomas from John Carroll and West Virginia universities, respectively:

There's also a closet containing music and sound equipment and a large bin of sheet music I won't even bother showing you.

The point is that, while this room will never win any interior decorating awards, it's my room, and I love it. Terry does a wonderful job putting together the other rooms in our house, but I'm very grateful to have one to myself.

After all, I have helped us make a lot of mortgage payments over the years. It feels like I've earned a few square feet of my own.

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.

I can't stop listening to this song

The fact that five people are playing the same guitar at the same time is pretty cool, sure. But it's the song itself I can't get out of my head. I bought it on iTunes and have listened to it over and over and over...Maybe it's not your type of music. I just think it's a great song.

(At the beginning, Terry thought they were playing "Baa Baa Black Sheep." And she's right, it does sound like that, along with "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and the ABC song.)

Anyway, give it a listen and let me know what you think: