A few weeks ago I pulled out my guitar from behind the coats in my front closet. I seldom get any good writing done after midday, and I was looking for something else to do on these cold winter afternoons.
I expected my playing to be lousy (it was), but I couldn’t even tune the instrument properly. Each time I gave any one of the tuning pegs even the slightest turn, there’d be a sudden “twang” as the string jumped from slightly flat to slightly sharp. Then when I eased back on the peg, the string would return to slightly flat. I should have gone out and bought a new set of strings, but decided that I would wait to see whether I was serious about playing. If I was only going to dabble for a week or two before putting the guitar back in the closet, almost in tune would be good enough.
The other day when I couldn’t get two of six strings exactly right, I realized that my guitar was a metaphor for all of 2025. By that I mean that it is not just my musical instrument that’s been a few hertz off. For the past twelve months, my retired life in a small Midwestern city has been slightly out of tune.
Slightly out of tune is the right way to put it. In spite of a lousy 2025 for many people, nothing of significance has impacted me personally. The cost of Manyu’s and my health insurance took a big jump, but we can afford it. Manyu is foreign-born, but I don’t worry that Homeland Security will prevent her from coming home after her extended visit to Asia. Climate change has decimating dozens of islands and coastlines, but I live inland and have yet to be hammered by a natural disaster.
Still, like Joe Walsh, I sometimes complain.* If my biggest problems in life are a guitar that won’t stay in tune, a snow plow that has taken out a swath of my front yard, and an old dog that’s forgotten he was once housebroken, then I don’t really have any problems at all. To a large extent, my entire life has been this way, and one of the big questions I’ve always had is how much do I try to live a peaceful life away from the troubles of the world and how much do I dig in and try to make a difference. When I started this blog, my plan was to write about the calluses on my finger tips from playing guitar. How did I get here?
* One of my favorite lines in all of rock music is from Walsh’s song Life’s Been Good. In it, he sings, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”
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