Darby Music Store was my toy store. While my mother's fingers walked through bins and bookshelves of sheet music, theory workbooks, and graded piano books for her piano students, I cruised the aisles of the cramped shop stopping to study the musical instruments displayed on velvet-covered shelves in long lighted glass cases, or hanging on side walls like works of art in a small museum.

I cannot recall how old I was when this fascination began. But I cannot recall a time when I wasn't smitten with musical instruments.

 

I imagined myself playing each instrument: woody clarinets, glistening trumpets, silver flutes, all manner of drums. I longed to handle them, try them out, hear their sounds. My sights always came to rest on the long wall of beautiful stringed instruments, violins, violas, guitars, their elegant, exotic shapes and warm brown and tan hues created a rich, textured tapestry.

Mom often finished her business long before I was ready to leave, and whisked me away from that magical world in the music store.

At age six, or was it five, I eagerly began piano lessons with my mother. She gave up on me after only a few sessions. We locked horns. I didn't understand why she became angry with me at the time. I thought I was pleasing her with my ability to imitate what she would play for me. She insisted I read the music. Her music degree didn't embrace or even acknowledge students who played by ear.

"Just play it for me, Mama," I begged. At first she did.

And I would play the song back to my mother, looking down at my little stubby child's fingers reaching for the proper notes on the keyboard. Once she determined I wasn't going to look at the music, she ceased pre-playing songs for me in hopes I would resort to the printed pages of music in my Little Oxford Piano Course.

Her plan failed.

After a couple of years, many trips to Darby Music Store, and a lot of pleading, I was finally allowed to take home one of the violins off the music store wall.

I was eight years old. 

I would have been delighted with any old instrument but its size and fit mattered. The crusty gray-haired store clerk with pince-nez glasses, a wrinkled white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and billowy pants held up by bulging suspenders, measured my hands and my arms. 

His eyes scanned the violin wall until he pointed to the right one for me. 

The violin shone with a deep-orange-brown finish, slick ebony fingerboard, rounded tuning pegs, and chin rest. As the store clerk placed it on my shoulder, I could smell fresh varnish and see no scratches on its finish, a sign that it was a brand new instrument, not someone else's cast off.

My parents made it clear that they would only rent this violin by the month, citing my unwillingness to cooperate with piano lessons with my mother. 

I devoured violin books, happy to learn to read music and also play by ear under the tutelage of Mr. Belfiglio, a passionate Italian maestro who came once a week to our house to provide me with lessons. 

Within months I was invited to join the advanced district orchestra and moved my way up to first violin. The joy of the orchestral music, its harmony, its textures, its challenges, and also the fun with other serious music students and their instruments, drew me further into the love of music. 

Despite my thrill with violin playing, I remained intrigued by the guitars at Darby Music. How could you play all those strings? Six, sometimes twelve? 

The guitar produced so many varied sounds, and unlike the violin, could be both a solo and accompanying instrument, the latter an ally for my signing voice.



I was a teen, still playing the violin, when our family moved away from the school district with the orchestra, away from beloved Mr. Belfiglio and my music friends, to Northern Virginia where there was no strings program in the schools.

And no orchestra.

The idea of playing violin solos was not my cup of tea, but I gave in when the band teacher at my new high school asked me to play in the annual Christmas concert. I remember standing up in front of an audience of new friends and their families in the school auditorium playing "O Holy Night" on my violin, accompanied by the choral director.

Kids stared, asked where I learned to play. Some didn't even know what instrument I was playing. I felt awkward, freakish.

Peter, Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez flooded the airwaves in 1964. Folk music fueled my desire to play the guitar.

My boyfriend allowed me to borrow his father's old Gibson F-hole steel-stringed guitar for two weeks. Another friend taught me my first four chords: G, Em, Am, D7. I practiced every spare minute, my fingertips burned with pain as I pressed them into the old, taut rusted strings of the antique F-hole.

At night I crouched, guitar in hand, in my walk-in closet, door closed, defying my bedtime, playing and singing after lights out. Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing. G, E , Am, D7; G, Em, Am, D7 over and over.

My first song.

When the two weeks of the borrowed guitar deal ended, a few school friends and I piled into a large gas-guzzling sedan and sped to Arlington, Virginia to National Pawn Shop.

Someone had gotten wind that National Pawn had a shipment of new twenty-five dollar nylon stringed guitars. I heard that nylon strings didn't eat away at your fingertips like steel strings.

I had saved just enough babysitting money to buy the guitar and contribute to a quarter tank of gas for the car trip. I knew nothing about guitars but was thrilled to have my own instrument. It looked okay and played pretty well too.

Exactly three weeks after its purchase, I accompanied myself and two girlfriends in the high school Hootenanny. We won first place and took home twenty-five dollars each with our arrangement of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" in three part harmony.

That pawn shop guitar accompanied me to The College of William and Mary where as a freshman I joined the Down County Four, a folk-rock group that performed all over campus and the surrounding area.


I still smile and shake my head when I recall the 3x5 card tacked on the campus center bulletin board. It caught my attention and led me to try out for the band. It read "Wanted. A broad who can sing and play guitar in folk-rock group."

I played guitar and led sing-alongs during study break at 9:30 pm in the all- female dorm. Donned in large round hair curlers and fuzzy bathrobes, usually smoking cigarettes and drinking Pepsi, we sat on the hallway stairs and sang our lungs out. "If I had a hammer..." " Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea..."
As an English major with papers due in classes on a regular basis, I gave guitar lessons to friends in exchange for their typing my papers.

I volunteered at Eastern State, the regional mental hospital near the campus of William and Mary. I could walk there from my dorm. Playing and singing for blank-faced patients seated in dimly-lit, sparsely furnished rooms frightened me. Often there were no attendants or caregivers present. Just me.
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But when I saw a smile emerge from the darkness or heard a lone voice sing along with me, my fears vanished.

While at William and Mary I toted my pawn shop guitar across the tracks to the segregated primary school and entertained the kids in a crowded third grade class once a week. 
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Their faces lit up with the music: they clapped, sang, even danced. Often they surrounded me, feeling my soft long hair, patting my light skin. Their responses remained in my heart as I crossed back over the tracks and returned to the insular world of a college coed.

As my skills improved on the guitar, I recognized the limitations of a twenty-five dollar instrument. It looked fine as a wall decoration on my dorm room wall and it certainly beat the rusty steel strings of the borrowed Gibson.
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But I needed something better.

During Christmas break I drove to Alexandria Music Store, knowing its reputation for fine instruments. My fascination for music stores had not waned and I was itching to get back into that magic place of my youth.
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Another wall of beautifully displayed guitars met my eyes. I planned only to test-play a few. At age eighteen I didn't need permission to take an instrument off the wall and try it out.

My eyes locked on to one guitar in particular, a medium-sized, classical style guitar with a warm honey-toned finish. I took it down off the display wall and sat down to play.

This little beauty melted against my chest, nestled perfectly into my left hand. I wrapped my right arm its body and began to play and sing. 

     Hush a bye, don't you cry, go to sleep ye little baby...

Celestial, mellow, moving. I'd found a soulmate.

This guitar was the one, a hand-made Swedish Goya guitar. But one hundred eight-nine dollars plus tax, on sale. And the holiday price expired on Dec. 31st. 
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I cashed in my savings bonds, robbed my scanty savings account, and brokered a small loan with my parents. 
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Goya was mine!