Camp Deep Creek - July 20 - Week 5

"Can I have the pink one Mama?"

Ivory snatches a pink pick out of my hand and starts to strum the strings on a red guitar.  I watch her play around on the instrument and am transported back into the narrow hallways of the music shop in Newfoundland, Canada where I bought my guitar and where I got the random assortment of picks that lives in the pocket of my guitar case.  A whole row of beginners guitars hung from the wall: red, blue, black, white... I almost bought the blue guitar, but then opted instead, for the beautiful warm toned wood body of the guitar I have now.  It wants to be touched.  It deserves to be touched, and I am embarrassed to admit that I can play it as well as when I bought it (which is not at all).  

I don't play guitar (yet.. at least I keep telling myself that.)

 Ivory doesn't play guitar either.

She plays an upright bass. 

She plays an upright bass in an orchestra of children pounding on drums, blowing into flutes, shaking maracas, trying out kazoos and harmonicas.  The result a cacophony of which Gershwin might have been proud.

The orchestra transforms and becomes a marching band..  marching up hill with saxophones blowing, drums drumming...  and then:

It becomes a band of mothers marching, carrying children and their instruments up hill. 

The band disbands.

The older children, Ivory among them, having reached the top of the trail, formed their own group, still carrying instruments and are rushing back down hill.

I am left standing just shy of the top of the trail with Sylvan, who had nursed the entire way so far, at my feet screaming: " I'm not going to take it anymore! Walk?!??! You want me to walk?!?!" (This is what I imagine he must be saying to me at this moment.) 

 "Oh, look rocks."

We walk back down.  The children's instruments are strewn about.  Guitars are stashed away and the shade of the tree draws everyone in close.

I gather up our flute, maracas, harmonica and drum.
I zip my neglected guitar into it's case and track down my pink pick.  

The air hums with humming birds, and Sylvan and I pause for a moment to watch them hover at the feeders.   He shrieks with delight, but I can't help but note how many fewer humming birds there are this week, how quickly the summer is rushing by and how very long ago it was that I bought my guitar.

Maybe, eight years after having bought my guitar, I can master a C chord...  and a G? ( I can do that, right?)

Ivory can have the pink pick.
I will use the white.
She will play upright bass
and I will play guitar.