The Citation

I’M NOT SENTIMENTAL about many physical things, especially instruments. But there is one guitar in my collection that is dear to me — not because it’s the most expensive or even because it plays and sounds the best. Rather, my Citation guitar is special to me because it was my first. It is proof that dreams come true.

As a nine- or 10-year-old, I learned to play on my dad’s very beat up but functional Marlin guitar. Dad’s Marlin was nothing like the Martin guitar Tommy Hunter played on TV, which we envied so much as we watched him perform on Saturday nights. As Dad had a very modest salary as a fish plant worker, we could never afford an instrument like that. For kicks one night after watching The Tommy Hunter Show, Dad and I stuck a pencil between the D and G strings of his guitar and crossed the L in Marlin to make it look like a T.

For most of the first year or so that I was in the Catholic folk Mass choir, I walked over Skinner’s Hill to practise with the Marlin wrapped in a black garbage bag, half the neck and headstock sticking out. I felt very uncool — and not at all like Johnny Cash, whom I’d see in magazine photographs hitchhiking with a slick black guitar case.

Fall came, and it was approaching the time when kids start putting together Christmas lists. I really wanted my own guitar but knew it was way beyond our budget. I figured I should go for the next best thing — a guitar case for the Marlin — so I’d look like more of a pro walking up and down the hill. Mom and Dad agreed that a guitar case was within Santa’s price range — happy news for me. Knowing most of the places Santa hid gifts in my house, I started searching whenever no one was around. Low and behold, under my parents’ bed was a shiny black cardboard guitar case. I was delighted. I was going to look like Bruce Springsteen. Awesome.

When Christmas morning came around, I’d already rehearsed my surprised look of gratitude. I walked downstairs, saw the case under the tree and said, “Thanks, Santa! A guitar case. Just what I wanted.” “Open it,” Dad said. “What?” “Open the case,” Mom echoed. I walked over to it and unlatched the three brass buckles. I lifted the top and inside was a brand new six-string guitar, “Citation” written in clever letters across the tapered headstock.

“Santa figured you should have a guitar of your own. And God knows I never get to play mine anymore,” Dad said with a smile.

I could not believe it. “It’s mine? My own guitar?”

I lifted it out of the case and strummed it, and it was every bit as good as Dad’s Marlin, maybe even a bit better. I looked around at my brother and sisters, who all seemed to know that in the world of Christmas gifts, this was a big one. They had this look on their faces like they’d just seen a really cool thing: a boy getting his first guitar.

I played that guitar until the brown fingerboard turned white. Grooves formed in the first three or four frets where I beat the wood back. It still hangs on the wall of my studio.