An Exclamation Point at the End

I found this picture, and I really love it. Easy Lou has been teaching me how to play the guitar for the last year-and-a-half. He is a brave, untiring, long-suffering (and slightly deaf) man. I also play the piano. It came easily, but, alas, the guitar has proven to be a different beast altogether (by beast, I mean something making loud, yowling noises.) My fingernails have been nothing but nubs of their former selves on my left hand for ages, and I’ve developed calluses on the tips of my fingers. But my Dm and F chords are coming along. Progress. The dogs have stopped trying to hunch each other when I play. Progress. Even the Gambler said last night, "Hey, you’re really coming along." (I actually haven’t let him hear me play since the first, very painful "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," as the Gambler can have a very biting wit.) And, over the last year-and-a-half, I’ve grown less jealous of my childhood friend who plays by ear (which Easy Lou calls "wasting time." Trained guitarists can be very catty, I’ve learned).

But, I mainly love this photo because it reminds me of a very special man I met sitting in an oncology waiting room. He was listening to an iPod with a legal pad resting upon his knee and a pencil in his hand. The elderly, black man with a kind face would listen and jot, listen and jot. I asked to what he was listening. "I’m learning Spanish," was his reply. "I've always wanted to learn, and this is the time. Right here, and right now." We talked just a little about cancer and tumors, and he said the simplest, yet most profound thing to me. "Cancer is only a sentence within one paragraph. It is not my story." I went home that very night and told the Gambler I wanted to learn to play the guitar. My darling, my dear bought me a beautiful Taylor guitar that very year for my birthday. And I am forever left with the notion that a single sentence, even those having an exclamation point at the end, is never the complete story.