I didn’t start playing guitar until I retired twelve years ago. I had moved from my long time home in Southwest Colorado to my last job as a regional director for a large engineering company in Pennsylvania. I’d been having back trouble for years, but it was during that move that things got serious. I was terrified of starting a new, high profile job as my back quickly began to spiral and I’d seen enough specialists over the years to know that sometime in the near future, I’d be needing surgery.
I began my new post and could immediately tell that it was going to be hell. Loads of responsibility and pressure trying to turn water into wine. By now, I was in serious need of seeing a pain specialist and getting some help with the worsening pain. Soon my situation became untenable. I’d come from Colorado a well conditioned athlete and elite mountain bike racer but now it was all I could do to sit through my fourteen hour days. I would be needing to find a place closer to work to mitigate the commute, which meant more sitting. By far, the most uncomfortable thing I could do to my body was to sit for long periods. The walls containing my life were collapsing all around me. I finally found a pain management clinic that would squeeze me in. Unbeknownst to me, there was a war going on and it was called the “Opioid Crisis”. At least in Pennsylvania, with some of the harshest laws covering the transfer and sale of oral opioids, it was like playing musical chairs and when the music stopped, I would be left standing. Clinics were booked solid and doctors were being forced to discern how much pain a given patient might be in while interrogating them to see if their pain was real or whether they were exhibiting “drug seeking behavior”, which closely mimicks being in severe pain. I was refused by two clinics before a doctor agreed to take me on as a genuine pain patient. At this point, I’d only been in Pennsylvania for three months and was already fighting to be able to perform well enough to keep my job and all that I had gambled when I left Colorado. We were deep in the throes of the”Housing Crisis” recession and virtually every industry, including mine in oil and gas, was hurting and laying people off left and right. I was fortunate that I’d found a pain clinician who, after seeing X-rays, MRI, and a CT-scan could see how badly I needed surgery, as my lower lumbar spine was completely decimated from years of concussive sports. He wrote a script for enough medicine so that I could sleep at night and continue working until a surgery had been scheduled. But, make no mistake, the pain was still bad enough that I could barely sit at my desk, let alone travel to and from Houston on business, something I hated.
It was at this time that I knew I needed something pleasing to concentrate on to keep my mind off the pain. Since I’d always looked to mountain sports and activities for stress relief but I could no longer even go for a walk, what I was looking for needed to relax me and help me with the intense anxiety and depression which were a byproduct of the pain. One Saturday and still several months from surgery, my wife and I drove to the area Guitar Center whereupon I spent the entire day trying different guitars and amplifiers. Years ago, I’d played a bit of acoustic in college and decided that this guitar was to be of the electric variety. By the end of the day. I settled on a reclaimed, old growth redwood Telecaster, an amp, and everything I would need to get started. I was after some high quality gear as my instincts told me that this was something I’d be doing for a long time. It literally took the entire day and when I got home I set everything up to get an early start the next morning.
As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t wait to wake the next day and try my hand at playing. That day turned out to be as epic as one before, as I played until my fingers bled and played some more. It was nightfall before I quit for the day. But what a day it was! I managed to remember more than I’d have thought from my bits of playing acoustic guitar in college and found something I’d never known about myself. At the ripe mid-age of fifty, I found that if I really paid attention to the sounds coming off of the fingerboard and the music I was attempting to follow, I could play by ear. I never knew what that meant until I played to a bunch of old favorites and turned Pandora to a blues-rock station where I attempted to play lead along to each song and found myself putting together many of the notes and fitting them in nicely to match the lead guitar on the song. It was a promising start, but, as with virtually everything else there is a spectrum when it comes to playing by ear. Let’s just say that I could do it well enough to thoroughly enjoy what I was doing. Most people spend months, or even years, working on music theory and learning basic chords before enjoyment takes the place of frustration. Aside from what many people seem to think, guitar is no different. But, at least for me, frustration would come much later when I’d gotten to be a reasonably good player but was now attempting more complicated things, so the learning curve slowed considerably and got heinously steeper. Time was coming up on my surgery date and the surgeon had instructed me to prepare myself for a long and painful recovery. I was thankful for getting into guitar when I did because I would need it for what would end up as years of chasing pain and having other surgeries, six in the course of the following twelve years. Times got pretty rough and I’ve all but completely lost myself several times now, at times falling into deep despair from the pain and associated depression. On a number of occasions, I’d even thought about taking my own life, but as bad as things got, I continued to play and began buying, selling, and collecting guitars to an extent that my fascination with “all things guitar” would become an obsession. At times I found myself reading long into the night about the history of guitars and learning all I possibly could glean about vintage acoustic guitars. I became an “enthusiast” and, while now more difficult, my playing continued to get better.
I’ve been playing for almost thirteen years now and have developed an equal love of playing acoustically. Today, I’m roughly 50/50 with equal time playing both modalities. My war with pain and what would become the “pain industry” had come to feel like a series of personal affronts and the only reason I was getting anywhere with these people was in advocating for myself and learning everything I could get my hands on about the mechanics of lumbar spinal pain and about pain itself. I would push pain management doctors to the edge of dismissing me as a patient and stop just short of alienating them. In some ways it was a plea for compassion and understanding, and I felt that I didn’t have much to lose if I was getting nowhere with a particular provider. If it weren’t for the constant support of my lovely and silly smart wife, I’d have been booted from every pain clinic I was seeing. She was always feeling me in during these appointments before the truth of the matter is. I did have a lot to lose if I lost yet another doctor for whatever reason. “Pain Management” is a horrible branch of medicine which is populated by doctors who couldn’t cut it in other fields like cancer research or surgery. Aside from my wife I had but one thing keeping me sane and above ground, and that was making music.
Retirement came earlier that id anticipated due to back problems, which forced me to the sidelines simply because I could no longer sit for prolonged periods and maintain an attention span that ultimately landed me near the top of the game. This all happened smack in the middle of my working prime, where I was at my best and earning a substantial income. I’d worked my tail off for nearly thirty years to get there. I endured the pain for as long as I possibly could and went and got that much needed surgery. Unfortunately, I was forced to leave my job to get it.
Aside from problems with my back, I would have a half-dozen major health scares with three playing out as near-death experiences. I have spent long periods of time where it was only by the grace of God and my love for making music that I made it through.
I had three surgeries in 2023 and have still not recovered. I had to relearn how to walk and have to use a cane to get around. But through it all, there were my guitars standing at the ready to help me through these hardships. But there would come a time that the pain that came from sitting for long periods of time or standing in one place with ten pounds hanging from my neck became untenable and I had to take a four year hiatus from playing. It was only after recovering from my sixth surgery that I made a pact with myself and that was, come hell or high water, I was going to play again. I started in again last August and, while it continues to cause my pain to be worse then if I didn’t play, I continue to push through it and refuse to stop again.
Over this entire chapter in my life, there has been my wonderful wife and three fine dogs to provide much needed emotional support. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to live mindfully and being thankful for all the things I should be thankful for…and, as rough as I’ve had it, there have been many. But nothing has gotten me through this thirteen years of hell like remaining positive and playing the guitar like there’s no tomorrow. I would go so far as to say that guitar saved my life several times over.
Our pond in rural Central Texas
A beautiful memory of Sage, one of our lovely dogs who passed away in 2021
