My James Taylor guitar
Maybe, at first you don't even notice it.
Your attention is drawn primarily to other items in the frame: the 1936 black-and-white portrait of grandfather Charlie Rush, the pot of flowers, the '60s era Polaroid camera, the splash of afternoon sunlight on log walls—and then maybe you notice, there in the background, the old guitar.
If I told you it's "the James Taylor guitar," that would certainly get your attention—for the '40s era musical instrument has a tale to tell.
When James and I were kids, 10 and 12, respectively, we were buds—spend-the-night type of pals. On warm autumn evenings when I'd be invited to sleep over, we'd go to bed with the windows open, listening to the distant frat party music as it wafted down from campus all the way to the Taylors' house on Morgan Creek Road, the smooth Black combos crooning "Handy Man," "Up on the Roof" and "How Sweet It Is to Be Loved By You."
James lived with brother Alex in what I considered to be Boy's Heaven: a modern, A-frame building with lots of glass and wood, actually separate from the contemporary-style main house.
James was an intense, thoughtful kid who didn't say a lot, but whose dry sense of humor mirrored that of his eclectic family. In those days James was not so much into guitar as he was cello, though he took lessons in both. (I remember a polished honey-wooded cello sitting grandly in his room.) When I mentioned that my mother had an old guitar, James, in his typically generous fashion, offered to teach me.
It happened one bright January morning after I had spent the night at James' place, and a two-inch snowfall had forced the schools to close. But, as we tromped the couple of miles across town to our house at 407 Pritchard Ave., instead of the normal high spirits that accompanied a snow day, I grew increasingly nervous.
That James couldn’t spend the night at my house was a great source of shame for me—even the very act of letting him into the house represented the sharing of a dark secret, cementing our bond. For nobody was allowed in our house. Nobody.
The year before, Nick, my 15-year-old big brother, had gotten into a violent cuss-and-shoving match with our mom, then stormed out of the house, grabbed his bike and rode off into the night, no helmet, no lights, all the way to distant Raleigh where he was struck and killed by a drunk driver.
Mom, convinced that Nick was running away from home, blamed herself for his death, and dealt with the self-condemnation in her own way. From the day Nick died, she never touched the house again, except to put something down.
Thus, over the years, the rooms piled high with the detritus of guilt: dirty clothes, newspapers, books, Life magazines, layers of dust, unopened junk mail, papers—the effluvia of daily living covering, disguising and burying any trace of my brother's presence.
Windows became opaque with dust, trails between mounds of newspapers led from room to room, chairs became indistinguishable blobs of old stuff, stratified according to whenever mom threw something down where it lay, until it too, was covered by the next thing.
Into this forbidden Dickensian warehouse of a home, I admitted my buddy James.
He seemed not to notice the chaos, but went straight to the old 1940s guitar I dug out of a murky corner of the living room that doubled as my mom's bedroom.
Sitting on my mother’s unmade bed, he tuned the old guitar, his long, supple musician's fingers guiding me through G, C and D7, my first chords played there in that dark childhood house of shame.
It's been over 65 years since that bright January day when James Taylor taught me to play the guitar. I lost touch with James when his family sent him to private school the next year. But nevertheless, the connection endures.
I own every album he's ever made, attended every nearby concert he's ever given, and always I remember that snow day in '57. Especially when I happen to glance in passing at the old guitar, there in the corner, for it seems to speak to me.
"You've got a friend."
Jock Lauterer is a longtime photojournalist and a Senior Lecturer Emeritus at the UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media.