anamude

THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY hugs the mountain side and blends to the main street of the town i grew up in. nestled off the southern california coast is the pier i spent many sunday afternoons, sometimes with a few pensive fishermen, many times just alone.where does this music come from? ...seemed like all the neighbors' children played piano and so mom had me take some piano lessons too. the lessons weren't memorable and i forget why i stopped going early on. but i do recall the mariachi bands that roamed the old downtown area, at the time a stretch of one to two-story buildings and brick road about five or six blocks long. so i saved enough lunch money to buy a small second-hand serenada at the music shop. fifty dollars, or something.dad drove me and my guitar twice a week in the evenings to the community college, where i took a flamenco guitar class...but dropped out half-way through. again, i forget why. time passed and i instead immersed myself in writing and poetry and resigned myself as a person void of musical inspiration. but one day i came home and my guitar was gone from my room. apparently, a friend of the family had borrowed it...well, since i wasn't playing it anyway. but when he returned it, i took that guitar to the pier and tried to teach myself alone...just to see if i could. all afternoon, mostly trying to recall those first guitar classes, some open chords, arpeggios. cold and so frustrated though, i almost just left her there.instead, i brought it back home and it stayed with me like an ornament, a disappointment, much of the time a ghost i couldn't shake. but in time--maybe it was just a matter of time--i heard that music they call country blues; i heard some of that early swing; and i heard some kind of instrumental folk. it was still a few years before that guitar found a place in my hands, but in retrospect i guess things do somehow find a way. then words much easier to write in solitude started to make more sense sung...i try to think about where this music comes from and right now i only see part of a highway on the pacific coast that hugs and bends around a mountain side. it passes through the town i grew up in, where there is a pier onto the ocean's edge, where i found my crossroad and where patiently i had waited for it to find me.