On a breezy, rainy Sunday, Tim and I sit underneath the balcony at the Mandolin Café, drinking coffee as we write about what ifs, or what about’s, or some big maybe.
A dog squeals down the street.
“The dog’s singing opera,” Tim says as he writes.
A brown-haired girls plays Pachebel's Canon in D, a smile on her face.
Next to her, a thin woman with sleek gray hair under a beret pens in her journal.
And my dog Zoey sits underneath the table, looking down Fourth Street to where the other dog yips and yaps.
I want to get up and dance, but will words do?
The dog’s squeals start up again, riding on top of the piano notes, echoed by the tap-tap of our keyboards.
The sun slips out and the rain peppering my laptop slides away, as if the clouds are all wrung out.
I imagine Tim’s fingers moving up the body of his Fender Stratocaster as if she were a long-bodied woman. She’s white, cool and slick, this electric beauty that stings the stage with her wide mouthed squeals.
Tim seems to fondle the Fender’s neck as his fingers fly across the scales. The Fender melts with a howl as he swivels the song’s refrain into a furious flinging of movement. A hummingbird flitting around a tulip, this is how his hands look as he turns a song into dancing hands.
It’s his pickup of sound underneath the strings that turns a simple maybe into his dream of Flying V.
For Tim, it’s not a mandolin, a banjo, the piano, it’s this taking of guitar strings like telephone wires that carry sound into whole new meanings.
The Epiphone, the epic of flying from A to Z.
