Standing on the deck of my parents’ lakehouse that Labor Day morning, I was tuning my 1975 Gibson Hummingbird while the sun came off the water in long gold strips. It was the kind of Kentucky morning my mother liked to describe as too pretty for arguing. The lake sat flat and silver, the dock boards were still damp with dew, and somewhere behind me my father was talking about charcoal as though grilling steaks were a moral responsibility rather than a Sunday chore.
I had brought the Gibson because music was still the only reason I bothered showing up to these family weekends anymore. Five years I had saved for that guitar. Eight thousand dollars, every cent earned through session work. It had been in more than forty recording sessions in Nashville, in studios with better security than my own apartment, on songs that had paid my rent and bought my truck tires and kept me afloat during the slow months when session work dried up entirely. It was not just a guitar. It was the first genuinely beautiful thing I had ever bought with money I earned purely from music.
Then I heard it. A crack, and not the sound of a dropped glass or a chair scraping or some toy knocked over. Wood, splitting. I looked toward the house, my hands still resting on the tuning pegs. Then a second crack, harder than the first.
I ran inside.
Tyler was standing in the living room, nine years old, holding my guitar by the neck. The body had been slammed against the stone fireplace hard enough that the bridge had torn clean off, the spruce top had split straight down the middle, and the strings had tangled themselves into something like a spiderweb, catching on the jagged edge of the sound hole. For one full second my brain simply refused to process what my eyes were showing it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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