Xenia is coming home in less than a week! With no time left, I made it my afternoon mission to seek out and buy phyllo dough to make baklava. Xenia’s walnut allergies are so bad that I can’t use my kitchen to chop walnuts when she is home. I missed the Middle Eastern store on my first pass but got directions from Coryn and found it at last. They had moved across the street into a strip mall. I picked up six boxes of phyllo dough and a jar of saffron syrup and left determined to get home before it defrosted. Pulling out onto Wyoming, a sign advertising a new guitar store with low, low prices caught my attention. In a moment of spontaneity, I did a U-turn and pulled back into the parking lot.
The store was tucked between two larger shops. I took the one parking spot in front of it. There were no windows, and the painted door had a doorbell and instructions to ring and wait to be buzzed in. I shivered while waiting to be able to enter a cold wind chilling my bare ankles below my jean skirt, but the vibration came before I could change my mind and run back to the car.
I entered into a crowd of motorcycle gang guys. The tall grizzly old men all wore leather pants and black, studded leather vests. They stared at me, a captive audience. I straightened my shawl so that it opened to show my hot pink long-sleeved shirt that matched my sparkle pink headscarf, considered my story, and decided to throw Esther under the bus for better effect.
I announced to the men, “Last year I had a guitar, but my daughter decided she wanted it for a birthday present; and she took it!”
Their gasps and disapproving murmurs expressed sympathy for my wrongs. They probably wouldn’t let their possessions go so easily.
“So, I need you to sell me a new guitar.”
“I can do that!” a high voice piped as a cleanshaven man in a polo and jeans stepped out from behind the counter. The other men looked at him and then turned toward each other along the wall hung with electric guitars near the huge humidifier blowing white vapor into the tiny store.
I told the salesman that I wanted an acoustic guitar with a built-in tuner.
He led me over to a used guitar hanging on the other wall.
“Have you heard of Myrtlewood?”
“Yes,” I told him, remembering trips to visit my dad’s folks in Bandon, Oregon. My dad’s aunt lived on a huge property nearby with a grove of myrtle trees on top of a hill with a grand view. Mom collected the leaves to put in an old-fashioned white bowl and ewer which sat on the mantle in the front room.
“Not many people have heard of it.” the man said.
“I grew up in Washington. They make bowls of it don’t they?” I remembered Mom’s Myrtlewood salad bowl. So many items from the years before my parents’ divorce had fallen out of my memory as they fell out of existence.
“Myrtles only grow in Israel and Oregon and this guitar is made by the only company with the rights to make guitars out of Myrtlewood.” He took it down and played a couple of chords.
“I’ll take it. Now I need a guitar strap.” I thought of the one on my old guitar with a green vine wrapped around pink and red flowers.
We walked over to the small selection of guitar straps.
“I want something with flowers,” I said.
“I don’t know if we have anything like that.” He rummaged through the black straps with spikes or crossbones and pulled out the only one with color, blue with Seattle Seahawks written on it.
He looked hopeful but I said, “I’m not a fan.”
A big scruffy man walked up to us, the light glinting off the spikes on his black leather jacket. He watched us for a moment and growled, “Skulls look like roses.”
It was a sweet attempt, but I said, “No,” paid for the guitar, and left the store.
I called Esther and after asking for my old strap back, told her the story.
“That’s the kind of story I can see myself telling about you,” she said.
It does sound like one of my everyday adventures. My new best friend Joanna, who was a music major, thinks we can get together some afternoons to play our guitars. Her son and Justin are friends at school. I’ve also signed myself up for Irish dancing, and Basil is going to join me for the tryout class. I feel like I’m settling in now that there’s some time for creativity in my life again. I may even have time to make some homemade Christmas ornaments with Sophia.
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