It’s Christmas morning in a small, snow-padded town in Anywhere, USA. A young boy, nine, maybe ten,thunders down the stairs before his parents have even poured their first cup of coffee. Under the tree waits a long, unmistakable package, wrapped clumsily in red paper and taped within an inch of its life. A Fender Stratocaster shaped secret with his name on it.
His hands, flushed with cold and excitement, shred the wrapping. The guitar emerges poly sunburst finish catching the soft glow of Christmas lights and he stares at it as though he's just been handed the map to a world no one else has ever seen.
He doesn’t know where this instrument will take him.He doesn’t know about the songs he'll learn in a naive, hopeful effort to impress a girl who will never know he exists.He doesn’t know about the nights he’ll spend hunched over in his room, fingertips raw, sweat dripping on the fretboard as he practices the same riff until it becomes part of his DNA.
He doesn’t know that this will be the guitar he never sells, even when the dream collapses under the weight of bills, and kids, and the kind of life that slowly rearranges a person when they’re not looking. He lifts it with the awkward but reverent arms of a kid who has not yet been met with the malace and jealousy of those who wish they had his talent but never did.
He strums the open strings.
He doesn’t know what the sounds mean yet, only that they mean something bigger than what his small-town words can hold.
In some quiet corner of his mind, the one that still believes in destiny he feels it: this guitar is his chance. His way out. His way up. His future.
He strums again, harder this time. Something surges in him
a purpose? a calling? and with all the fervor of a prophet receiving revelation, he cries out
Let's stop right there. Do you think at any point in this kids first formative guitar experience he dreamed of one day debating intellectual property law on the internet?
No he did not
He just wants to play his instrument
Shame on you both
