HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION
Yamaha, Jr. ERIC KREBS
F
or my ninth Christmas, Dad bought me a right-handed Yamaha FG-Junior acoustic guitar. I was left-handed and so furious with my father for handicapping me that for eight months thereafter the guitar leaned against the basement futon, mostly untouched. Mostly. From time to time — in secret — I’d swipe at the instrument like a curious, unmusical animal. A guitar’s open strings spell E-A-DG-B-E, and a full strum forms an E-minor-seventh chord with a suspended fourth. Suspended chords demand resolution, and strumming in the violent way non-guitar players always strum in search of it, I pulled the instrument out of tune. One day I tried to pull it back. Instead, I snapped a string. Dad noticed. The broken string was physical evidence of the interest that I, out of spite, had tried to hide. He swapped the nickel strings for nylon so my un-calloused fingers could press them a bit easier. My act was waning. Sure, the Yamaha still felt foreign. It was still the wrong way around, and, in any orientation, I still couldn’t play it. But the guitar and I had something in common, something I could no longer deny. I was a hormonally stunted kid. Dr. Cervantes, my first endocrinologist, had a scatter plot of percentiles for age and height in her office. I hugged the horizontal axis until, at thirteen years old and four feet six inches tall, I began nightly injections of human growth hormone. The Yamaha, similarly, was three-quarters scale, small. So small that, in my runty hands, it — and I — looked normal.
Yale Daily News | 19
