When I was little I thought every dad played the guitar.
I thought dads would get home from work, clean up, sit down in the living room, and play songs by Vicente Fernandez and Julio Jaramillo long after dinner was finished.
To me that was just a part of being a dad, like taking out the trash or building cardboard doll houses when they didn’t want to buy you a real one.
My dad would let me sit on his lap and strum while his fingers would glide effortlessly along the neck of the guitar before I would pull away and run off to my next adventure with stuffed animals and flashlights under blankets.
Humming along as I heard him from my room, I repeated the one lyric I remembered now and again while I did homework. His singing was the soundtrack to my childhood.
Sometimes I’d hear the music he played on the radio or at family parties and feel connected to the unfamiliar voice singing what I thought of only my dad’s songs.
In the fourth grade my own music gene was awakened by the video game Guitar Hero. I convinced my dad to get it for me, pleading, “It’s a guitar game. It’s almost like the real thing.”
He got it for me. But it wasn’t like the real thing.
The ‘80s rock songs from the game were a stretch from the pasillos my dad would play.
Still, my eyes would stay glued to the TV as I watched the colored notes on the screen, ones I would have to match on my guitar controller.
Green. Red. Yellow. Blue. Orange. Different combinations. New songs. Other lyrics.
After about a month I needed more than the plastic guitar buttons could offer me. I needed strings.
Asking my dad to buy me a guitar introduced me to his real passion for music. His eyes lit up and I felt a warmth from the way he talked about going that very weekend, and how he described the various colors and guitar sizes the store would probably have.
At the store, as I got close to electric guitars, he walked in the other direction, toward the acoustic section. “You have to learn these first,” he said as he held the wooden instruments like trophies, measuring them to see which would best fit my 4-foot-9-inch frame.
Every night after that we practiced.
I would stretch my fingers into different positions and press my squishy fingertips against the hard vinyl strings, taking breaks from the Fa, Sol, La chords to rest my little hands. They would be cherry red from the pressure of the cords.
My father has been playing the guitar since he was 14. “It’s only until you have calluses like mine,” he would say, reassuring me. “See?”
His hands were rough but gentle. He had cuts and scars from working all day at a supermarket, handling boxes and dealing with produce, but could thread a needle and sow a rip in my shirt if I asked him to.
After a couple of weeks, I was playing songs I had until then known only as my dad’s, and singing the lyrics that had always sounded better in my dad’s voice.
I accompanied him as he called out chords, arranging my fingers on the frets.
Throughout these months I saw my dad look at me with pride. I was his prodigy. He thought I would continue to play these old tunes and sing for our family like he did. Except I didn’t.
He would tell me it was time to play, and always in his most positive tone, but it became an effort for me to stay focused and find happiness in these sad love songs. They were all he knew, and I wanted more.
I could see the strain in his face, the loss of our hobby together.
“Maybe later,” I would groan each time, until one day he just stopped asking.
I never really picked up a guitar again after 5th grade.
Today he pauses his guitar playing when I ask him a question about taxes or kiss him goodbye, off to new adventures with my boyfriend, job, and college.
His concerts have moved into the basement. I wanted to add to his new music haven and gifted him a new guitar, speaker, microphones, and music stand.
He mostly plays the same songs he always has, but some new ones have crept into his repertoire. Sometimes he asks me to print out their lyrics. And sometimes he’s inspired by songs he hears on TV shows. “YouTube this for me,” he would say to me, before I taught him how.
The guitar is my dad’s thing, not mine. But even now, whenever I hear Vicente Fernandez and Julio Jaramillo, I hear my dad’s voice, and I know that the songs are ours.
