The parable of the guitars

i went to guitar center last night to peruse the best they had to offer. i'm such a wannabe guitar hack... while i was there, i reminisced about some former guitars i've owned.

two different ovation custom balladeers, a vintage guild d4, a takamine eg series cutaway, and an olympia od5 made of white ash... the first ovation was stolen out of my car in the church parking lot before a sunday evening service 29 years ago. i replaced that ovation with an identical one (after saving up for six months!). at the same church building, that guitar was stolen right out of a classroom during a youth group "all-nighter"...some kids let a guy in the building during the middle of the night and he bagged it.

silly me, after saving up some more money (and some help from the youth group), i bought another ovation and kept better care of this one. in 1989, i traded it in on a vintage guild d4 from a little "hole-in-the-wall" guitar shop. i had watched it for nearly a year and finally saved up enough money to go with my trade in. favorite guitar i ever owned... the week before we moved to texas in 1995, it was stolen from the church we were serving in san diego. some kids we were working with stole it during a bible study and took it to a pawn shop for drug money. didn't have time to stick around to find it...

when we moved to texas, it took a little while to save up some more money, but after a few months, i purchased my takamine. six or seven years ago, a youth minister from another church group tried to steal it down on a mexico mission trip. no joke! thanks to some stealth undercover work by ol' buz, i got it back. a couple of years later, though, the guitar was fully submerged in water when the tip of a tornado touched down on our camping area during a summer junior camp. i still use that guitar, but it sounds like i'm playing in a fish bowl...

i bought my olympia guitar a few years ago, and, guess what? some local downtown lewisville hooligans broke into the north point church building and stole it! recently, i purchased another guitar...not a real expensive one...duh.

the moral of this story? church is not a safe place. definitely not for guitars. sometimes not for people. more on this in days ahead...