Getting Back to the Hippie Roots

I've been experiencing a good amount of nostalgia lately ever since I made the "big purchase": my new guitar. (I haven't given "her" a name yet. Any and all of your suggestions are welcome.) For example, I decided to take this past labor day weekend as a time to relax, reflect, and relax. (Did I already say relax?) So I packed up all of my belongings including my nameless guitar and trudged out to my parent's house. They live in a nice rural subdivision; it's peaceful, quiet, and there is just a swarm of the world's cutest children to play with during the day. (I'll have to tell you sometime about my parent's little neighbor boys. They are just PRECIOUS.)

As I was growing up, my parents used to always tell me that I was born in the wrong era. I should have been a flower child. Now, mind you, I don't run around in corduroys, and flip-flops with dreadlocks in my hair, although back in high school and college I teetered (I had a few interesting experiments with some wild red hair dye, and also got the nose and the tongue pierced- the tongue piercing lasted for five years. The nose thing was more just a short-lived passing kind of phase.) But deep down inside, I've always been a little bit of a hippie at heart. In high school, my friend Chelsea used to be my "guitar teacher", and we would sit and jam for hours together. I was never deemed good enough, however, for us to take our dueling guitar show live, but you better better believe that we had our goofy little butts up on stage for high school talent shows in our tie-dyed tanks and bare feet: with me belting out my best Jewel rendition while Chelsea backed me up on guitar. Those were the days, let me tell you. I would sit in my room for hours and twang away, knowing that I had a little less than a care in the world besides diligently learning how to play the guitar.

So now, as I snap you back into the year 2005, I'm sitting on my parents' living room floor, half strumming an old tune I used to know, and half marveling at my new very-well-worth-it purchase, my dad looks at me and says plainly, "you know you were born in the wrong era, don't you? You're such a hippie. Now that you have your guitar, all you need is a couple of tie-dyed t-shirts and one of those "Scooby-Doo" vans and you can like, road trip man, just you and your guitar... man." (*sigh* Dads...) I certainly wouldn't go that far, but there is definitely a peace I get when I pick up my new pretty guitar, (fill in name here). There's just something about it. So no, I won't be asking Scooby if I can borrow his van any time soon, but I am holding out for the tour bus. It's okay. I can wait.