Today I visited the music store where I do my guitar dreaming. There must be a couple hundred of those stringed beauties hanging on the wall. Walking in there is somewhat akin to entering a candy store and drooling over the chocolate. About a year and a half ago I finally began doing something I'd wanted to do for a long time - learn to play the guitar. Now I suffer from GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome).
Left handedness always stood as a curse - so I thought - and prevented my learning to play. One year at Christmas the young boy I was opened a gift containing a small guitar. It came with a simple instruction booklet, and I began strumming away. It sounded terrible! I held that instrument as a left hander would and gave no thought at all to the fact that chord fingering needed to be opposite, a mirror image of those chords I saw in the booklet. That little guitar got set aside and ended up I don't know where.
Now, fifty-five years or so later, a book I spotted in the public library, Left Handed Guitar, begged me to take it off the shelf and take home to study its secrets. The chart of basic chords it diagrammed was translated to a left hander's perspective. The door opened to a huge room filled with the music of guitars. No longer do I play "air guitar" as I sway my hips to the music in the radio. I do it for real.
