I don't know how much I have written about it in the past, but my major pastime is playing music.

While I am almost as un-talented on any number of instruments, I can get by on a guitar and also pick a little (very little) on a mandolin. I have messed around on a bass guitar and the drums a few times, much to the chagrin of all of those around me. The drums are an instrument that, even when played by an expert, were never meant to be contained in someone's back bedroom or an unused storage shed. As a youth, I started out playing in several garage bands with my eyes glued to some unforeseen star that was going to land on my head and make me famous.

Those dreams passed by like a warm summer's night, still leaving in their wake a passion for music that could never be killed by hard, cold reality like most dreams. When I first started playing, I was in a band that played some of the most God-awful stuff you ever heard. It was just racket - occasionally in key. The songs were even announced that way from time to time, something like "This one is called Headache in the Key of E."

Then I started learning more about my instrument of choice, the guitar, and picked up on music some of my friends loaned me - Creedence Clearwater Revival (one of my favorites still today), the Beatles, Steppenwolf, George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers, Wilson Pickett, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Birds, Country Joe McDonald and too many others to name.

While I had grown up on a steady diet of country and bluegrass, that was what my parents liked. What teenager in his or her right mind wants to be anything like their parents (until they grow up and get smarter)?

Even though I didn't start off that way, the draw of country music was strong. I seldom told any of my friends that my first 33 record was Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits, but I bet I wasn't the only one who had it. Prior to that, I had several eight tracks that I liked, including some George Jones, Tom T. Hall, Jim Reeves and Merle Haggard. I would sit in my room alone with my guitar for hours as a teenager and try to copy their songs. Sometimes it even sounded like what I was playing. Well, sort of.

It was a few years later when I started playing, tentatively, my first bluegrass and old time music. I still have a great respect for the music as an art form and I realize the talent involved on the part of the singers and musicians. But sadly, I never did really excel at it. But I still put forth an effort every now and again, mainly due to one experience - my first bluegrass picking experience of note, which happened in Fox Hollow, a place I am sure no one has ever seen short of the good Lord, and he won't tell anyone how to get there. It is so far out that they have to pump the sunshine in. They went to town one day and saw a telephone pole for the first time and have been scared to go back out since someone told them, "You oughta see them cows they got behind those big fences."

Seriously, I was playing music with some fellows on a dirt road off of a gravel road when this bunch stopped in looking just like that Darling family on the Andy Griffith Show. Their "spokesman," a large barefoot fellow in bibbed overalls wearing a straw hat, came over to talk to the banjo player. That banjo player was a blue ribbon winner from way back, having captured competitions everywhere he went. He knew almost everyone and was friendly with most of them. He was a very patient man, which was good since he was playing with a young man who knew more about Johnny B. Goode and George Jones than about Sally Ann. Well, after a brief discussion, the "Darlings" left and the banjo player said that he wanted us to come down to Fox Hollow to play at their house. They had hitched a ride home with a neighbor and had to leave to go build up their fire before their pipes froze or they would have stayed around, he said.

Evidently they had been on a grocery run and had even offered to feed us all. "Don't worry," the picker said. "These are good ol' boys."

Their house was just a "short piece" down the road, the banjo player said, but two of us would have to ride in the back of the pickup. It was nighttime in October, meaning the temperature was around 40 degrees outside - just cold enough so that your breath rose in plumes around your head like imaginary cigarette smoke.

We loaded up our guitars, ourselves and the banjo and a mandolin in the back of my friend's pickup and set out down the twistiest dirt road I had ever seen. I kept falling over when the rusty and evidently-shockless truck hit bad patches of washboards, leaving me staring up at the crisp autumn sky through the silhouettes of the dying leaves. Isn't it odd how you remember some things in the most minute detail, while other events seem more like some fact you just read in a book somewhere?

At any rate, we stopped at a pull off on the side of the road and the banjo picker shut the engine down.

To be honest, I thought he needed to use the bathroom, but he came around the truck and asked for his banjo, adding in, "Ain't y'all coming?" We got out and started walking down a path I hadn't noticed before. We walked through the woods for a good 50 yards and then came to a creek with some fellow laying in it. He was face down and shirtless, his head on the bank and his body in the creek.

As I stopped to check on this fellow, someone came out on the porch and called to us to come on in. I asked about the fellow in the creek. "Don't worry about him, he does that all the time." I stepped up on the porch and as they were introducing us to everyone, he said, "They've already met our buddy Bridge out there," and everyone cut up laughing.

One fellow, a particularly large man with long brown hair and a flannel shirt on was preparing to make supper.

He was tossing pork chops (or something that looked like pork chops) on top of the Franklin stove - no pan, no pot, no oil. I admired him for his ability to avoid washing dishes, as any single man should. He asked if anyone else was hungry, since they had plenty extra. I was fairly hungry and figured that fire kills germs, so why not? I ordered up the house special, blackened pork with soot sauce.

By this time, someone had broken out a jug (an empty one for playing) and someone else had spoons. Another fellow had a little fiddle and pretty soon I was listening to some real fine music. The banjo player took off his resonator and everything was blending in well. Someone asked me why I wasn't playing. "I don't know a whole lot of bluegrass or anything, I'm just learning," I answered, still a little shy in those days. They wouldn't accept that for an answer. As I protested, the banjo player leaned over to me and explained that the fellows were insulted if someone wouldn't pick with them, thinking that maybe I thought I was "too good." Looking around the room at the large and evidently healthy fellows, I didn't have to think for long. Pretty soon I was playing along as best I could and having a wonderful time in spite of my earlier shyness. I actually did pretty well on a few songs. These fellows really appreciated music, which is about all they had out there with no television, no radio in sight and no way to get around. "Bridge" even came in after we started playing, but still was shirtless and by now shaking like a leaf.

One of the big bibbed-overall wearing fellows decided to help him put his shirt on. When he put it over his head, he accidentally got the arm hole over his head and his arm through the neck hole. That didn't phase him much.

He just gave the shirt a good jerk and made a turtleneck T-shirt (I don't think it caught on in stores). When the fellow fussed because his other arm was trapped under the shirt (not because he was choking from the shirt sleeve around his neck like I would have been), the big man ripped a hole in the side and jerked his arm out. "There you go, little man," he said, obviously pleased with himself.

Pretty soon, my mystery meat was done and someone passed me a large knife with the meat stuck on the end. I still don't know what it was, but I enjoyed it at the time and didn't get sick later. That's how I define a good meal. As for that night, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. Especially when I think about "Bridge" and his turtleneck T-shirt.

I still play music from place to place, but that place was awful hard to top. I never did get good at bluegrass, but I love to hear it and I always do my best. I am not shy anymore about playing, something that I learned to avoid with time and the lessons that started that night. I used to think that I had rather listen, watch and learn to mess somebody up who was doing a fine job.

But after that experience, I realize that it is better to play hard and poorly than to not play and anger big men in bibbed overalls who live way out in the woods. Isn't it funny how we all learn our lessons in life?

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