I was remembering the first time I saw Homer Meeds house. I thought to myself this here looks like a movie set about some mountain man in Alaska who plays with grizzly bears. I guess I wasn’t too far off, turns out he got bit by a bear once. It took a hunk out of this thigh, but he must not have tasted like bear food, because Homer lived to enjoy the rest of his life.
But the thing that helped me to bond with this fella (other than the fact that I married his daughter), was his collection of musical instruments. Lots of yard sale guitars and banjos and mandolins (including an electric one.) fiddles, harmonicas, even a lap steel, and a scarily out of tune parlor piano, with about twenty percent of the ivory missing. And there in the midst of all this was this wonderful old 1940’s era Gibson guitar.
Now when I see a Gibson I generally stick my nose up in the air and pretend that it’s a lesser form of life. Not because I really feel that way, but because I’m a Martin sort of guy. And it feels like I’m cheating if I play on one of them things. But this time I made an exception, because none of my friends were around that I might have to explain my infidelity to.
That thing sounded good! It played like an old tree trunk, but it was rich, man. It sounded like the music coming from a stage door canteen in the middle of world war two. Like something a sailor would play sitting on his bunk thinking about that girl he left behind.
I think that guitar must have absorbed the time of it’s creation. Homer was a sailor once. Not in WW2, but in Korea, and he knew all those songs from then, and all the ones from before, maybe all the ones since Noah got off of the ark, at least that’s how it seemed to me.
And we’ve played a lot together, Homer and me. Played at loaves and fishes, and the grange hall, and the mobile home park in Ashland, and down at the Yerts by Charleston. The old salt even took me out on the ocean in his little boat on a foggy, misting morning along the Oregon coast. Where I set peering over the side in a somnambulistic haze wondering if we’d make it back alive. I remember opening my eyes and seeing a round head pop up out of the water five feet in front of me, and nearly going into cardiac arrest before I figured out that it was just a sea lion laughing me.
Homer’s getting old now. He’s not playin’ as much as he used to, but when he does it’s usually on that old black Gibson. And I play with him, out of respect, because Homer sings like an Appalachian dirt farmer that ought to be recorded by somebody who understand good music and world war two era Gibson guitars. There ain’t enough of either of them left in this old world.
And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
