This guest post is courtesy of my long-time friend, Tom Kleese. If you’d like to learn more about him, you can visit his website.
A couple weeks ago I had my best moment as a musician. No one heard it, and the satisfaction of knowing it was just for me is a sign I’ve finally found the perfect place to play my guitar. I am practicing not for a performance; I am practicing “porch presence.”
In August 2024, we moved to my wife’s fourth-generation farm in northwest Iowa, tucked into the scenic Loess Hills. We don’t farm the land, but we do take care of the seven acres of the homestead, and it’s a big job. Three goats and a donkey will arrive later this summer, but only after I’ve figured out how to reconnect the water supply to the goat shed and spent some serious time learning how to build goat-proof fencing. I am told they are naturally curious and dedicated to finding any possible openings. Never underestimate mammals with cloven hooves.
The farmhouse is a lovely 1919 Craftsman bungalow with the requisite additions for more modern comforts, and it sits on a gradual slope just before a steeper backyard hill I’ll mow this afternoon when the much needed rain from last night burns off. On the front of the house rests a newly restored porch, passed over in recent decades for a more practical deck leading into the house where others choose to be. But the porch is where I sit and play after a day of working outside. It offers a grand view of 75 acres (corn this year, soybeans last year), and less than a mile away is Climbing Hill, Iowa, population who-the-hell-knows but Wikipedia says 97, so we’ll go with that. The slogan on the sign welcoming you into town reads: Climbing Hill. It is what it is. We are who we are in Climbing Hill, avoiding excessive filters on the selfies we don’t take out of modesty.
I’m 61, and for as long as I can remember it’s been a dream to play lead guitar in a rock band. The dream was never powerful enough to motivate me, however, to actually learn how to play. I know my chords and a few riffs, and the occasional muscle memory takes over from 40 years ago when I did put in the time to learn “Hey, Joe” and “Stairway to Heaven” using guitar tab sheet music found in copies of Guitar World.
I vowed not to buy the Taylor 214CE of my dreams (list price $999) until I could walk into a guitar store and play something that impressed other guys like me. My plan was to transfer $10 from checking into savings for every hour I practiced. One hundred hours and then I’ll be ready.
“You’re only paying yourself $10 an hour?” a friend laughed when I told him.
“I’m not worth any more,” was my honest but telling response. Therein lies the problem – measuring our activity by some extrinsic scale.
On a Saturday when we still lived in a condo in Verona, and when I had absolutely no yard work to do, I drove across town to Dave’s Guitars under the auspices of checking out a new budget-priced Taylor with a bolt-on neck. I hadn’t put in the mere 50 hours I’d need to buy it, but maybe I could negotiate with myself. Buy now; practice later.
The open-string chords of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “From the Beginning” sounded hollow and tinny, and I quickly hung it back in its place and picked up a guitar not quite to my dream standards but much closer: a used Taylor 112. Those same chords now echoed into the space of Dave’s, and I kept playing longer than expected. Screw it. I’m going to buy this, because I deserve it now, not later. I handed the clerk my business credit card and pretended this was a bonus for exceptional performance in the office. It’s my LLC, after all, so I can hand out bonuses as I wish.
The time on the porch is mine. I don’t play in front of Hilary and I don’t jam with either of my sons, who are way better than me. I just play for myself, learning a few new riffs from an app and falling into the comfort of things I know by heart. The other day I heard my fingers do things my brain didn’t know. Notes jumped out of that Taylor that surprised me. But it takes a while to get there. I have to be on the porch for the better part of an hour, and I have to give myself permission to keep playing through the missed notes and ignore what I can’t and may never be able to do.
I am trained as an artist, but I haven’t painted for almost 20 years because I made career and life changes which I don’t regret. Next summer I’m going to build a 12’ x 10’ studio behind the machine shed, on that slope tucked between a spruce and some maples we just planted. I remember what it was like for my brush to do things my mind couldn’t predict. I know how important it was to use my entire arm, not just the hand holding the brush, because the marks on the canvas revealed those full motions.
I’m not good enough to get up on stage, and without an exponential uptick in practice time, I’ll never be. I’ve dialed down the dream to compensate for age and reality. Now I just want to play bass and provide solid backup vocals in a sh*tty bar band in a sh*tty bar some Friday night. More important than the throaty cheers, the Bic lighter salutes or the demands for an encore, none of which have a chance in hell of happening given my current trajectory, are the moments I’ll spend this afternoon after two-and-a-half hours on the Dixie Chopper zero-turn-radius mower, as Hilary waters plants and I take my place on the porch. Henry, the Black Lab, sits just beyond the porch surveying his kingdom, and I am where I’ve always wanted to be.