Big Stone Gap | Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids

Jack doesn’t quite make it with his Wednesday guest post –

This was going to be a post about my birthday on Monday and I suppose it still can be.

Yes – it was yet another one and I had a great night in the local-ish Indian restaurant with a group of close friends. I was also amazed at how many folk felt connected enough to wish me the best via Facebook, which has its good and bad points but keeps us all in touch if we can ignore all the crazy stuff.

Good friends, good company and excellent curries on Monday evening

But my present to myself has been a year in the preparation. In a recent post I mentioned a guitar that was being repaired and put back in the condition (in fact better than) it was when I first bought it some years ago. So here’s the story –

I had been traveling back and forward between Scotland and the US and was very nervous about my big guitar having to travel in the hold of the planes, so I started researching ‘parlor guitars’ as they can fit in the overhead bins. I was searching online and found a guy in California who found parlor guitars at house clearances and had a whole lot for sale. I took a chance and bought one from him. A bit like folk buying a tour of Scotland from someone they’ve never met!

When it arrived it turned out to be a Lyon and Healy Lakeside. L&H still exist but haven’t made guitars for a long time. Based in Chicago they are known now for their pianos and harps. The Lakeside was their second top quality guitar – the top one was called the Washburn (the middle name of one of the partners). They sold the Washburn brand and that’s a whole other story.

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When my Lakeside arrived I was completely charmed and impressed. It is the only guitar I’ve seen with back and sides made from oak, and how anyone could have bent these sides is beyond me. It had a bright and punchy sound and was incredibly easy to play. These instruments were popular with mountain music groups of the 1920s and 30s because they were both cheap and could be heard alongside the banjo and fiddle. Sadly my guitar quickly began to deteriorate with a split on the top, a split in the heel of the neck and internal braces loosening.

Enter two new and good friends who made an introduction to an excellent guitar luthier in Nashville and organized transport of my beloved Lakeside to and from that wonderful craftsman. I really thought I’d get a quick response saying it was beyond help, but didn’t hear anything at all!

I had been told it would probably take a year as he had to fit it in between his own much sought after bespoke instruments and that’s exactly how long it took.

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This morning I finally got her back and I’m completely astonished. He deliberately didn’t try to make her look like new, but simply made everything just how it was when I first got her. But much, much better. She looks pretty much the same but sounds and plays like a dream. The big thing I found when I first got her was that the neck was narrow and had a distinct ‘D’ cross section which really suits my hand. When I sat down this afternoon to play her I knew all the trouble and expense was completely worth it!

So to all 400 of you who wished me happy birthday in various ways – I’m amazed I have that many folk who care. To those of you who made it to Sahib’s on Monday evening, I just finished my tandoori prawn tonight. To the love of my life who traveled down from WV to make sure I survived – hang on – we have a 20^th anniversary approaching.

To Paul, Bill and especially Chris Bozung – thanks for giving me back the Lakeside (not to mention the anonymous original makers who’s instrument sold for the first time for $6 in 1906 in a Sears Roebuck catalogue).

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

When I was a teenager, Penguin produced a range of classics for a pound a book. I’m not sure how mid-90s money translates across the Atlantic, but for this reader who’d only very recently discovered the joy of bookshops it was a revelation.

All of a sudden I went from being able to afford a book a month to what felt like an unlimited supply of new reading material. No matter that some of the classics I bought were as inaccessible to a teenage girl as A Clockwork Orange is to most human beings, I suddenly had the ability to visit a bookshop and buy more than one book. I browsed, I bought, I read.

Among these purchases was The Age of Innocence. If bookshops inspired my love of reading, it’s this book that opened my eyes to the possibilities of what books can hold. This book grabbed me, shook me, chewed me up and spat me out the other side, leaving an exhausted woman wondering what I could possibly read next that could ensnare me in such a way.

All this in what many misinterpret as being just another society love story.

In some ways that interpretation is correct. The main strand of the book is Boy Meets Girl, but the setting of that introduction (I don’t just mean 1870s New York) and the subtle storytelling are what make it so much more than a story of love versus responsibility. After all, this was the first Pulitzer Prize-winning book by a woman.

The Age of Innocence is the book I recommend and/or gift the most, and I’m currently re-reading it for a book club. For some, like teenage me, I fully expect them to comment on the love story, but I’m also looking forward to the other aspects they question: the freedom, or otherwise, of the different women; the rules that constrict our hero’s choices; and maybe even the impact today’s societal conventions have on our own lives – we’re technically more free than the characters in the book, but how much do we bind ourselves in our attempts to fit in?

Edith Wharton writes with intelligence and humour, encouraging her readers to question the sense of that world and its hypocrisies, and while her focus might have been a few centuries ago The Age of Innocence is as relevant now as it was then.