My 24 Guitars

For The Bitter Southerner, Elissa Altman recounts her lifelong love affair with playing the guitar. She began playing at an early age, and discovered that she could find peace and safety in the sounds she could make amid the ongoing cacophony of family discord.

When we arrived in Vero Beach, my father and I sat together eating deep-fried coconut shrimp at a kitschy seaside bar in what had once been his officer’s club during the War, looking out over the water at the shipwreck that he had used for bombing runs when he was a 19-year-old Naval ensign. I was 15 and drinking cold beer and he, gin, and we ruminated on the instruments I longed for, and why. Each one, I told him, had a life and personality all its own; each had the power to make me better than I was, and better than I might ever be without it. I did not like boys and did not yet admit that I liked girls, and guitars were an inanimate repository for my affection. Living with my grandmother in his childhood home with her disintegrating baby grand in the corner of the living room, my father, single after 16 years of marriage, talked openly about what he looked for in a woman, and I talked about what I looked for in an instrument.

Smoothness, sweetness, warmth, a history, an easy and kind neck, playability, I told him, drinking my beer.

Same, he said, sipping his martini, pointing out to the shipwreck.