But now I’m used to it. So used to it, in fact, that when someone comments on it, I’m taken by surprise, and upon looking down, discover that the carpet really is orange, and I have somehow completely forgotten this. It can be disconcerting.
It’s not that I’m absentminded. Well, not that absentminded. It’s just that when I’m in this room, I forget to see.
I like to open both the windows, and let the breeze blow through. It makes the intense heat in the summer months bearable, and I like the feel of air moving against my face. Sometimes I turn on the fan. Its humming is loud in the silence, but with the first slight touch of my hand on the guitar strings, it is cast into the realm of unimportance — part and parcel with the orange carpet.
My guitar is older than I am. Once upon a time my mother tried to teach herself to play with the same instrument. On my seventeenth birthday she gave it to me. I had learned to play it long before, but on that day it became mine. I have never been more surprised, before or since.
The face of my guitar is crossed with tiny, jagged lines — “cracks in the finish,” my guitar teacher liked to say. It’s an Applause, by Ovation. Not the world’s most expensive guitar, but not a cheap instrument that goes completely out of tune after one song, either. When I play chords they are deep and rich. I have never found another guitar that makes quite the same sound as mine. Nor have I ever found a guitar that looks the same as mine. I love its colors — the brilliant amber and red, and the black. It’s not as plain as regular, sandalwood guitars. And it’s a round-back. So when the choir director plays it, it keeps sliding out of his hands. He just doesn’t quite know how to hold it. And when I play his flat-back, I’m uncomfortable. It doesn’t sit right against my body.
There’s a worn space on the neck of my guitar, where my thumb sits as I play the chords. It’s not correct guitar posture to hold the thumb that way. My guitar teacher always used to chide me for making up my own way of doing everything. To this day, he cannot understand how I only use one finger to make the “A” chord.
My other thumb is growing a blister, a very small one, but very painful when I run it over the strings. I think it’s because I don’t like to play single strings with a pick, and it’s because I play “The Hammer Holds” over… and over… and over… until my thumb is fire-engine red and it is sheer torture to touch the strings again. But I can’t stop playing even then. I take up my guitar pick and strum a different song.
I play upstairs in the Newman Center, in the aforementioned orange-carpeted room with a window on each end, and huge pillows that line the walls. The campus minister once told me, after I took my guitar home for a week, that she missed hearing me sing. And she is not generous with her compliments.
I like to say that I go upstairs to “make noise” — to mess around with chords and songs that all jumble together in my head, and to sing, sometimes at the top of my lungs. I worry that I offend people because I’m so loud. But I don’t worry enough to stop playing.
Once a friend saw me going upstairs and told me she was glad I’d come. She could use some music. So I left the door open. When I came back downstairs, she had gone, and I walked into the middle of a Newman Council meeting. Nervously I pointed out that they could have shut the door, and one of the attendees, startled, said, “I thought the radio was on!” I told him I would love him forever.
I don’t like to play for other people. My voice — which is so strong and loud when no one is in the room that I can sometimes be heard in the basement — becomes a tiny squeak when I’m aware that someone is there with me. The only time I can sing at all is when I don’t notice that people are noticing me. A friend once startled me by coming up the stairs and sitting at the top, in the middle of a song. I didn’t even know he was there until I finished, he spoke — and I jumped.
In this sense, I am not a performer. But I love to sing for God. My favorite shirt has a picture of someone’s hand on the fret board of a guitar, and says in tiny letters at the bottom: “I play for an audience of ONE.” I play for that same audience. And strangely enough, while human beings both startle and embarrass me by listening to me sing, God never makes me nervous. I am only giving back to Him the gifts and talents He has given me, in the best way — the only way — that I know.
Sometimes when I play, I close my eyes, because I feel God so close to me that I’m afraid to leave them open. I half-expect to see Him sitting across the room from me when I finally do look around again.
There is nothing magical or supernatural about my music. It’s ordinary — tunes you would hear in church or at a prayer group. The songs I write are ordinary — usually only three or four chords in the entire song, and I use some of the same words and phrases over again in each of them. Sometimes I can’t tell one from another. But the music catches me within its motion, within its message, and transports me to another place, far beyond the confines of the center, the campus, the city — a place where one day I will belong forever. I stand before the very gate of heaven when I play. And I know that God is listening.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Pamela Acker holds a BA in biology and recently embarked on a career in genetics. Her homeschool education included extensive readings in Catholic doctrine, and she continues to devote much of her free time to improving her understanding of theology and helping others understand their faith. Her email address is pjacker1s@yahoo.com.
