Memoirs of a Flower Child by George S Geisinger (most read books of all time TXT) 📕

a time, it is unlikely that anyone would not know, through at least the 60's and the 70's, at the very least, that I was everywhere with that guitar. I was a guitar player, publicly.
In 1977 I bought a new guitar. It was a Yamaha G65, and the longer I owned it, the more beautiful it became in my own proficiency and tonal maturation of the instrument itself. That guitar was beautiful. The action on it was perfect, and the fret markings were exactly where I wanted them to be. I did a lot of good composing on that Yamaha, and in the long run, I became so introverted with it, contrary to the way I had intitially been with it, that I scarcely ever played in public or private for anybody anymore, but only played, memorized and composed some more, with no outlet for my songs for anyone to hear what I was doing, whatsoever.
For a while there, after I had become so introverted, I began to want to make a little money at it, so I was going to a recording studio, trying to get some of my work into digital recording to make it marketable, but the process was slow and expensive. An agent had offered me a recording contract, and he had taken me into a recording studio at one point, but I had an accident, breaking on finger of my right hand, and he lost interest in me right away. When I was going to a studio on my own later, I found I had a lot of difficulty concentrating on playing accurately. I was using checks from a credit account I had, to pay for the recording sessions, and could not keep up with the debt or the recording sessions, either financially or with my concentration.
As a result, I finally got so discouraged that I had so many solos with no one to listen to them, I got so discouraged about my musicianship I ended up giving up the instrument altogether. I ended up putting the guitar back in its case, and letting it sit idle.
Soon, I had a bad fall going up the steps out of the door well of my apartment out of doors, and sprained my left hand desperately, and have not been able to play since, even though I decided I wanted to set myself up with some kind of list of places to play, like senior citizen environments and the few coffeehouses that have survived the demise of the young people's movement to the 60's, but I could never seem to manage the project at all, and most of my work has never been listened to by anyone.
Things seem to go from bad to worse with my guitar music over the years. I had worked on pieces in the institutions I needed to be there, whether I had my own instrument or had to borrow one to work with, and I had very little paper to write on, forcing me to memorize everything, and play everything frequently to keep from forgetting my pieces.
The more time went by, the more discouraged I got, and found myself letting the instrument go altogether, loosing my memorization all at once, having to struggle to read my scores to even try to play any of my work, even for myself, and the spraining of my left hand in that bad fall restricted the possibilities of what I could do with my guitar, and I found myself having to use nonstandard inversions of chords, and the like, to make my music work.

If all that wasn't tragedy enough for my guitar work, there was a bigger tragedy on the way.
I had a lot of confusion about taking my medication not long ago, and soon ended up overdosing on my pills over and over again, several days running, with a series of institutional incarcerations, loosing my treasured Yamaha guitar and all my scores, in the process of loosing almost every possession I had to my name, of every description, except for my financial resources.
Now even my own money is not directly available to me to a large extent, and I wonder how I'll ever get another guitar.
Since then, I've been able to find some of my scores, because I had disseminated them among some friends and family, and I'm at least somewhat equipped to recover a few of my earlier compositions from over the years. But some of my most recent work is lost to a junk yard, I suppose, because I did not have the presence of mind, being so sick from the overdosing, I could hardly arrange to store my Yamaha or scores, or any other of my treasures, for safekeeping, leaving almost of my sundry possessions to be thrown away indiscriminately.
The shock of the loss has been overwhelming to me, even though I've been able to appeal to some family and friends to send me scores I sent to them sometime ago. This has been more successful than I expected, but I'll need another guitar to work with, just as I needed to purchase another computer program for writing the scores down again, having lost my computer along with my guitar and so many other things.
Worse yet, the last of my elders in my family have passed away, and I have no one to look to for moral support.
Though I'm in an assisted living environment near my brother and his family, my feeling is that I am way far out on a limb, with nothing to catch me from falling at all. I wonder how I'll ever be a musician again?

The “D” Rodgers
Chapter 6

Mary Lynn was one of the “D” Rodgers, possibly the only one of the whole clan worth remarking about at all, at least from my personal perspective. She was a devout Southern Baptist girl, one who practiced her piano about as religiously as she attended her church services. She practiced her piano for many hours of each day, for an entire lifetime at her tender age, honestly frustrated that she was not 36-24-36 at the ripe old age of 19, that she was too short, her midriff was not flat enough to suit her, and she was totally unnoticed by the young men, according to herself.
She would not permit herself to be wild like her heart told her she should be, in the midst of all her propensity toward propriety. Her entire youth was slipping through her well rehearsed fingers, as if she were destined to be an old maid, whether she wanted to be or not.
She played Chopin in Performance Seminar one day at the university where we were studying music education, and it was heavenly, as if she were an angel playing her celestial piano or harp, and I was aware that I knew her from classes, as she suddenly lost her place in the middle of the piece, tried to begin anew in the midst and couldn't, got up and fled the stage, flushing in the face, but all of a sudden I loved her. I was the young man who noticed her. I wasn't even looking at her until then, but I saw her all of a sudden.
I caught up with her in the lower hallway of the music building after seminar, and cheerfully said something about how impossibly complicated that piece was, and how she should not let it bother her at all. Anyone could get lost in a maze like that particular Chopin piece, and she really did play beautifully, and off I went, into my own orbit, leaving her behind as abruptly as I had approached her, to stew in her own juices and watch the Yankee playboy from out of state, who apparently had ambitions for some sort of musicianship, and Lord only knew what else, darting away suddenly, after saying such a nice thing to her, as she later referred to it.
I had never spoken to her before.
I was a wiz at some of the musicianship classes, making the most accurate replies to the professor's questions, a very talented and precocious lad I was, and too eager to sit near either she or Liz in classes, until Liz became a moot point. Mary Lynn became all the point of everything all of a sudden.
Soon, I was inviting her for walks around the university town after class, oblivious to the notion that everybody was watching and listening to my advances, as we all issued from the classroom door. I persisted, and she would go walking, while I labored at keeping myself between her and the street, and keep her mind occupied with all the things on my heart for this exceptionally talented and wonderful young lady. She walked quickly, as though wanting to get away from me, but we were both 19, and I was quite capable of keeping up with Mary Lynn on foot, talking all the while.
Furthermore, I would patrol the practice rooms in the music building, looking for her to be busy at one of the pianos, and would go into her, and turn pages for her, being gifted at knowing how to follow even the most complicated musical scores well enough, while we found ourselves in the throes of passions we would never speak of, not even much later, when we would be acting them out however much, quite beyond ourselves with our mutual youth taking advantage of the both of us, although I blamed myself singly for all the boldness in my behavior, as if there was never a young man with a healthy libido who ever existed before me.
So I walked her and talked to her, running her around all the streets and roads of that small university town, but she would not “go out” with me for a full six months into the fall of that year. I did everything I could think of to charm her. My first time at the intercom of her dorm, trying to get her to come down to see me, since it was forbidden for a man to go up in the woman’s dorm, I asked for her by name over the speaker, and was greeted with the question, “which one?” Oh, I was momentarily daunted at first, but recovered myself quickly enough, and replied that I was looking for the one girl who played piano like an angel, and she eventually came to the lobby, glowing with the delight of my flattery.
I invited myself to pass through her parent's house at the holidays, to be taken to the airport from there, to fly the 500 miles north to get home to where I lived, and called her on the local pay phone less than 48 hours later, having hitchhiked the distance back down on the interstate roads with a friend, hoping to see her for one more brief, desperate moment, just a few days before that Christmas.
Both her parents, who did seem like very nice people, also seemed like they were old enough to be her grandparents, but I took that observation in stride, and visited their home very seldom while I knew the girl.
I had brought a buddy with me, for safety while hitchhiking, and we got out of the big rig at a gas station, somewhere in the same city where she lived, and I called up and asked her to come get me, getting all the information misidentified over the first call, what kind of gas station it was, what route number of what road – I guessed it all wrong on the telephone, and her father and brother