Dead Man’s Guitar

Music brings me joy — playing music, listening to music, even just looking at instruments.

I have quite a few guitars. It honestly makes me happy just owning them, even if I’m not spending a lot of time playing them. I like to see them hanging on the walls.

But that’s not what this story is about. This is about the dead man’s guitar.

One day I was cleaning out our storage unit. I have an old Ibanez Artcore bass guitar in there with a cracked neck. It was in the way of what I needed, so I moved it to the front of the unit and out by the little pathway that runs through the facility.

As I shuffled the old bass around, I started thinking about the Gibson SG I used to own with a cherry red sunburst finish. Now that was a nice guitar. You know what happened to it? I lost it. I don’t even know how. One day it was just gone. Did I black out? Did I get robbed? I wish I could tell you. I have my theories, but the truth is… I lost a lot of things back then.

For a few moments, as I reminisced, I wished I had that guitar back.

An old woman walked by, stopped and stared for a while, and eventually moved on. She came back later, stopped, stared, and again moved on. I didn’t pay much attention to the stopping and staring because at this point, I had organized our storage unit with shelves and bins and random people would frequently walk by and say “oh, wow, your unit is so organized.” I’m not even exaggerating — 2 or 3 people would come by and complement the appearance every time I was there getting something. I’ve never been so proud of my organization skills and I temporarily made jokes about starting a storage unit organization company.

But again, that’s not what this story is about.

The old woman made one final return. This time she was pulling a cart load of random items. She held this red SG-clone out in her hands and said “can you please take this?”

I probably stared at her for a full minute of confused silence. “I’m sorry. What?”

“Can you please take this?” She said again.

“You want me to take this guitar?”

“Yes. It belonged to my husband. He’s dead. I see you have some sort of instrument here and I thought maybe you could use it for something or fix it up.”

I asked what her late husband’s name was… and her answer somewhat perplexed me because it was my name.

Anyway, I told her I’d take it, if that was truly her wish, and find a purpose for it. For the past year, it’s served as a prop in the background of my YouTube videos. And I lovingly refer to it as “dead man’s guitar.”

Also it’s a reminder that sometimes the universe does really weird stuff. It definitely isn’t a Gibson SG… but it really kind of looks like one.

“Oh, do you want that thing? Here’s something that’s kind of resembles that thing.” – The Universe