I am in love with my 12-string acoustic guitar. Black and audacious, it’s traveled to the other side of the world with me. I got it from my parents for my 19th birthday and I’ve never heard any sound come out of it that wasn’t utterly gorgeous. But though I feel close to the guitar and I’ve never had anything against naming an owned thing per se, still for a long time the idea just never made much sense for my own little family of instruments.
Hexa (a.k.a. Mary Greitzer) gifted me a much beloved copy of Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” a few months before I moved to Thailand in 2007 to write my dissertation. An amazing and prescient book, it just struck me the way the right books at the right times can. Then I left the country for a year with a few bags and a guitar, to hide out and write an opera and then to travel. Though I’d trekked a fair bit elsewhere, I had not been to Asia before I arrived in Bangkok that first night with everything I’d have for the next year, when she named herself. Finally in my hotel room I ordered a large plate of pad thai, smoked a cigar, opened the Red Label left in the room (the kind for which one pays too much at checkout), and then carved “Rocinante” into my guitar’s hard, scraped, sticker-free plastic case before passing out around 4:00am.