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How I left America, and my adventures in Moscow as a husband, father and artist.
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the dove (many hands)
The guitar arrives, and a young man waits in the hallway as we take it inside. I crack the case open, that new car smell wafting out. It needs to be tuned of course. The body slides out, all reflections and odd details. It feels so solid in my hands, like a tiny mountain. There is a dove on the pick guard, where my hand rests for a moment before the first strum.
As I brush across the strings for the first time I think of the life it lived before now. The factory, the workers that shaped it. Great lumbering machines and thunderous sounds. Clouds of paint and gloss and sawdust. So many hands that it took to build it. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers until the guitar was called done, a tiny sticker on the back of the neck with someone’s name scribbled on it. And then somehow it made its way here of all places. The eighth floor, and our messy living room. Me, on a stool with an Am chord, in the hot afternoon.
It goes back in the case, so snug.
Time to pay the man in the hall.
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