It's been a week of guitar stories & video clips, and it reminds me of one of our old stories...which also has a point to it...
It was March 1998, and we were on our way to our honeymoon in the Lake District. We had booked a romantic week in a cottage in Eskdale, and I was packing the car in readiness for our long drive from Basingstoke. The last thing I put in, as it was such a delicate piece of equipment, was Petra’s beloved guitar. Now, I am not a musician and understand very little about playing music, and even less about caring for fragile musical instruments. As I put the guitar in the boot and closed it, it never occurred to me that I might have done something wrong. Only when we arrived in Eskdale later that day and we were unpacking did I realise something was seriously amiss. I pulled the guitar out, and the neck of it seemed to be hanging a bit loose in the case that it was in. It was wilting. I knew from The Beatles that guitars might 'gently weep'...but guitars don’t wilt. As we unzipped the case the full horror was revealed to us; the neck hung so loose that only the strings were holding the guitar together. I had inadvertantly broken its neck.
This guitar was Petra’s pride and joy. Well, it had been until I came along, but then I clumsily put my newly acquired status in jeopardy. She’d had it for a few years and it was very special to her. There was nothing else like it on this planet; maybe even the universe. Many of her friends had commented on how tuneful it was. She had a certain affinity with this guitar. What a great way to begin a honeymoon!
On returning to Basingstoke, we were told by a friend of a place called ‘Guitar Village’ in nearby Farnham, and he believed that they just might be able to restore Petra’s beloved guitar to its former glory. We went there and they gave it a quick once over, and pronounced that they should be able to repair it in about a week, and that it that it would cost us forty pounds. We went on our way, feeling slightly chuffed and more than a little hopeful.
Four weeks later, after a variety of lame excuses and stalling techniques by the repairman in answer to our regular telephone calls and ‘on-spec-see if it’s OK’ visits, he told us that it was a cheap guitar made of boxwood, and that it probably wasn’t worth the time and effort it would need to repair it. He advised us to give up on it. Quite why it had taken him four weeks to come to this conclusion, we don’t know. Petra swallowed the guitar-shaped lump in her throat. It was one thing to be told that he couldn’t do anything about it; but it was another to be told that ‘it wasn’t worth the effort’ and that it was ‘cheap’. The emotional attachments that we form with our possessions are not always valued or appreciated by repairmen. We concluded that we’d buy another one on our next visit to Czech Republic. We left the guitar to rest in peace at ‘Guitar Village’, imagining that they had a cemetery for guitars there, and we put it out of our minds. It was dead. It was finished.
The following week, on a Sunday, we came back from church in the morning to an unexpected answer machine message on our telephone. It was the repairman from ‘Guitar Village’ to tell us that Petra’s guitar was now repaired and was ready for collection. Hang on a minute; did we miss something here? For one thing, it was supposed to be dead and buried. What was there to repair? But also, we weren’t even aware that they were open on a Sunday. It was the day we least expected a call from them, if at all. We played the message back a couple of times, just to be sure that we hadn’t slipped into the ‘Twilight Zone’, before we called them to arrange going to collect it. Yes indeed, they confirmed that it was repaired. It was alive and well. With no explanation as to why he’d continued trying to repair it, he told us that he’d managed to fix it with a certain glue, and it had passed something called the ‘tension test’ and now it was fine. Feeling like we had passed the tension test, we breathed a very big sigh of relief. A couple of days later, Petra and her guitar were reunited and it only cost us thirty pounds. Not only had her guitar been resurrected, but we’d also got it cheaper than we’d been quoted too!
It was four months from the time I lopped off the head of the guitar with the car boot before Petra was able to resume playing it again. It was almost as good as it had been before its accident. It lasted for a few more years, but eventually it bit the sawdust. Even the combined powers of prayer and ‘Guitar Village’ were not enough to save it when the bridge parted company with the rest of it, and refused to be reconciled. It really is now in ‘Guitar Heaven’, although the memory of it is still very much alive in Petra’s heart. I’m not convinced by the traditional belief that when we die, we will all be sitting around on clouds plucking away at our harps. But I do have a sneaky feeling that when Jesus shows Petra the place he has prepared for her, tucked away among the many mansions of his Father’s house, she will find that old guitar nestling in a corner, waiting to make music again.
Lazarus was someone who died and came back from the dead. He was left in the tomb until he was well over-ripe. When Jesus eventually arrived at the tomb where he was buried, having left it deliberately late, just to make a point about him being the ‘resurrection and the life’, he asked the people there to roll away the stone from the tomb, and was told, as the old version of the Bible puts it so nicely, “Lord, he doth stinketh!” Undeterred by Lazarus’ body odour problems, Jesus called him and told him to come out of the tomb. Interestingly, I once heard an African preacher say that the reason Jesus called Lazarus by name is that if he had not been so specific, he had such power that all the dead would have risen from their tombs! He had to be specific. He only called Lazarus, and Lazarus did indeed rise from the dead, with his grave clothes still hanging off him. One minute, he was stinking and rotting; the next, he was running around the cemetery, perhaps feeling a little peckish. But alas, he didn’t go on to live for ever; not yet. He had to die again. Just like Petra’s guitar.
