Mandolin Strumming (It's all about the follow-through...)

Last Christmas, my brother Conrad gave me a mandolin.

For months, I’d been rhapsodizing about learning to play, how I loved bluegrass music, how beneficial music is for one’s general wellbeing. I’d excitedly told friends and strangers that I was going to learn to play, daydreamed about what kind of pick I would buy (got to go with the ever-classy and ever-so preppy tortoise shell), imagined that holding the thing would suddenly improve my singing voice. This mandolin obsession could have very easily been relegated to my “list of great ideas that never made it into reality” accompanied by tennis, gardening, my all-girl band, starting a union, discovering the secret societies at Furman, having a Christmas tree forest in my living room, and founding a settlement house. I enthusiastically plucked away for most of the Christmas break of 2009, annoying my sisters and infuriating my musically inclined mother for whom errant sounds can cause real internal strife. I could play “Amazing Grace” and “She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain,” happily, but with the sinking realization that boredom and forgetfulness would catch up, that I would be derailed by school and life, and that my gleaming mandolin would soon be collecting dust and disappointment.

For a while that’s exactly what happened.

But then, in the midst of one of the most difficult summers of my life, a friend unexpectedly gave me a gift to match my brothers’. My friend Matt, who is one of the most dependable and faithful people in the world, told me that he played the mandolin (well, in fact) and that he’d be happy to teach me. Elation! Again. So he began to give me lessons and songs to play. He also told me to practice. He tuned that mandolin a couple thousand times. He fixed it when I dropped it. He took me to the music store because I was too self-conscious to go alone. In short, he followed up with me, and, because there was another actual human being involved, my people-pleasing tendencies refused to let me forsake the music this time. At first I could play three chords. Then five. It wasn’t easy. My hands felt awkward and I got unladylike callouses. Also, I constantly felt embarrassed at both my lack of skill and at my exertion of effort. In Nashville, people who have never even seen a mandolin can play it better than me. But, those five chords, clumsily combined, have brought me real enjoyment in creativity. I’ve made up some silly little songs and a few not-silly ones.

I read a line in a history book about southern evangelists who traveled around “armed with guitar and bible, accompanied perhaps by a mandolin strumming or tambourine shaking wife.” I may or may not have begun envisioning myself as a mandolin strumming wife…

In December, a full year since Conrad gave me that fateful Christmas gift, I invited some dear people over for a “Mandolin Concert.” I missed chords, Matt and Fletcher played guitars, and everyone sang, loudly, triumphantly, of Emmanuel, of Hope, of Light in a manger. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for music, for friendship, for the voices of people in my community, for faithful teachers who won’t let you quit something, for melody. Really, it was not a concert, but simply a time to remember and to sing about the real gift of Christmas.