It was 2007, my parents had left for the weekend for the tractor pulls in Bowling Green Ohio, and my grandma was left in charge of watching over me and my sister. She wasn't a mean old hag, she had a way of dealing with problems in her own ways. Unorthodox means, yet effective results.
Well, me being 15 with no car and nothing better to do I invited some friends over to go bike riding. Before we went on any adventure back then it was custom to roll up a fatty and smoke it. We were about halfway through the joint, starting to cheese out and laughing at everything, when my grandma walked into the weathered red barn where we were toking it up. Boy was she pissed. She knew exactly what we were doing before she saw us. She might have smoked a pack a day, but the mint flavored nicorette kept her nose open.
My friends fled the scene, ran right out of the barn, hopped on their bikes and away they went. They left in such a hurry that I was left standing there dumbfounded with a lit joint in between my fingers. Her eyes glared deep into my soul as she marched up to me and snatched the joint from my hand. Angrily chewing her gum she smelt the burning herb and threw it to the ground and stomped it out.
"Don't look so shocked it's not even that good." She said.
I was speechless, she didn't cuss, swear, or yell at me like my dad would have. Instead she told me to get in the car and wait for her. I had no idea what the hell she was going to do and the anxiety from smoking was not helping. She got into the car, turned the key, threw it in drive, and off we went.
I'll never forget the speech she gave me. She spoke of how she screwed up raising my uncles, letting them do what they wanted when ever they chose. She spit her gum out the window and lit up a cigarette, I could see the tears forming in her eyes, but she was stubborn and too strong to let me see her cry. She told me how she never invested time into her kids lives aside from working and how she believed that made a huge impact on why they turned out to be drunks and drug dealers.
We pulled into a driveway that led to a small music store out in the sticks. We both got out of the car, she threw her spent cigarette on the ground and stomped it out just like the joint 30 minutes prior. I was still stoned as a goat and had no idea why we were here. Once we got into the store she told me to pick an instrument and keep it under $100.
I found a glossy red Washburn hanging on the wall and I fell in love with it. She told me on the way home to put my time into learning new things instead of getting stoned and playing video games. So I did, I finished out that weekend trying to learn scales and chords while blistering my fingers. When my parents got back my grandma didn't breath a word about the real reason she bought me that guitar.
I've kept this guitar in the best of shape that I could, it means a lot to me and I could never bring myself to sell it. It holds a memory of my late grandma and all of her badassedness. I remember when she was close to kicking the bucket and all doped from the chemo and pain meds, she told me that she would hear me play no matter where I was. Part of me thinks that there's some bit of her essence out there in the cosmos listening whenever I play.
