I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(37)

People who are good at small talk have a handy knack for greasing the gears of social interaction among strangers, and that’s useful. I wish I were better at it, truthfully. But when small talk starts replacing real talk, you start to feel like you’re among strangers even when you’re among friends. I was in a phase of life that required a certain amount of socializing, floating around in blobs of people waving and smiling courteously. I needed my other interactions to balance those out. To offer some real connection, some meaning.

More so than ever before, I missed my college friends. Whenever I could, I schemed to go visit them or get them to come visit in Atlanta, so we could stay up and hash out life in brutal detail. I missed the debates in class and confessions in the dorms and dreams in the dining hall—and not because I missed being in college. I missed feeling known. I missed knowing what the people around me thought, wanted, needed. Whenever we got together, we clicked back into that gear, and our conversations hummed and sparkled.

I knew college was over. I knew that one of the reasons we talked so much when we were younger was that we needed to figure out who we were and what we believed—we needed to hear it out loud, change it a little, hear it again. I knew time was at a premium and life was more complicated nowadays; there was less time available for talking. But didn’t the very fact that life was more complicated now mean we had more to talk about, not less?



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I don’t know that I’ve ever liked small talk, but I do know I used to be capable of it. I used to be able to mm-hmmm and oh, really? my way through anything. But now it made me want to knock over tables. It made me feel like the world around me was tuned to sports radio, and everyone but me knew what it all meant.





Rock You Like a Hurricane


Existential spending doesn’t really cure anything, but it’s an enjoyable—if expensive—way to dilly-dally on the way to doing what you really have to do.

Having just finished a couple of big writing jobs and a volunteer project, I suddenly had more time on my hands than I was used to. The kids were getting older, too, spending more time at school, not depending on me as much. I felt like vapor in need of a shape to contain me. Who was I if I wasn’t that person busy with a hundred tasks and a dozen phone calls to return every day? Who was I if no one needed me to make their lunch anymore? And what good was I—what quantifiable measurement could there be of my worth—without these value systems to calculate it?

These questions didn’t excite me. They terrified me.

But rather than face that terror, I tried to ignore it. I told myself I felt antsy because I was bored. I probably just wanted to have some fun. I deserve a break! I thought. This is what people do after a big job ends! And because I am a relaxation-challenged soul who doesn’t know how to simply unwind, I chose a mode of fun that also felt a bit like work: learning a new instrument.

I bought a guitar.

In another version of this story, the guitar-acquiring narrator might be a guy who’d been in a band in high school but then became an accountant who always dreamed of the parallel life he might have lived if he had followed his ambitions, so to reclaim his youth he goes and buys a Stratocaster and sets up speakers and amps in his garage, and now he plays “Come Sail Away” in there and cries. This is not that story. I had no rock-band past. My love of music has always been from the outside, as a fan. The only music I had ever produced growing up was as a classical pianist, and I’m sorry to say that I hated it. If I never play another piano scale in my life, I’ll be damn glad. But I have always loved the feel of guitar sound vibrating in my bones at a concert. I craved the ability to make that sound myself.

Okay, I admit I did have fantasies. Not that I would be famous, more that I would discover some latent talent that would propel me into the social circle of the bands I listened to on the radio. I imagined Brandi Carlile, one of my favorite singer-songwriters. The first time I saw her play live, she wore a red bandana tied around her bicep and a black leather vest, and she had the voice of an angel who had just washed down a handful of gravel with a shot of whiskey. She was the human embodiment of cool, a model of courageous self-expression. So sometimes, when I envisioned playing my own guitar, I liked to imagine that if Brandi and I met, we’d find that we had similar artistic sensibilities. She would probably decide we should be a traveling folk-rocker-chick duo and I’d start wearing a red bandana around my bicep just like she does, and we’d be gritty yet melodic and everyone would love us and wonder why we hadn’t paired up sooner. And we’d say, “Hey, it’s like we were climbing two sides of the same mountain and we just met at the top.” We’d write lyrics together, and Brandi would tell audiences how, while my guitar skills are indeed passable, what really makes this whole thing click is how I’ve helped her grow as a storyteller. And I’d say, “Oh, please. It’s nothing.” Everyone would chuckle and be enthralled.

That wasn’t my dream, though. It was only a daydream. I really just wanted to see if I could play a few chords.



* * *



I did a lot of research in choosing my guitar. I didn’t want some dinky thing that would fall apart, because I was sure that as poorly as I’d play it in the beginning, I’d probably break it if it could be broken. I also didn’t want a pre-owned instrument, because the germophobe in me couldn’t stand the thought of strumming strings encrusted with layers upon microscopic layers of someone else’s skin flakes. So I quizzed my dude friends from college who were known to occasionally cry over their amps in their garages, and settled on a no-frills Martin acoustic. A review online billed it as “popular and affordable” with “classy looks.” That made it sound like a homecoming queen, but the price was right.