“I’m sorry for the hot room” he said as I followed him into what was really a cubicle.

“Take the first chair” and I reply, “that’ll be the only time I’ll be in a first chair,” and he smiled as he shut the door and sat across from me which was only an arm’s width. He held his guitar on his lap.

But I set down my guitar next to my chair, unopened. Too big for this little space and too soon. I suddenly regretted all the decisions that seemed to have led me to that moment -which would last sixty minutes – because when I signed up for guitar lessons thirty minutes seemed too short.

Thirty minutes is only a cup of coffee and reading the news. Thirty minutes is Wordle and Spelling Bee. Thirty minutes is walking the dogs, washing the dinner dishes, putting away laundry. Thirty minutes means nothing major gets accomplished. Like finally learning guitar before I’m dead.

I’m well into midlife. If I’m lucky, that is. Mid implies halfway, doesn’t it? Midlife seems to assume (well I once assumed) that you get to calculate from a hundred. Humans can theoretically get to a hundred if they are lucky. And avoid high-risk things. At least that’s what my parents said. But now I know the truth. There are no promises, really, about anything. We don’t have control over the thing that happens next. We can pretend by making plans and adding them to the calendar. But just as easily the calendar can ultimately reject them, without warning, like it did earlier this summer. I drove up the eastern seaboard to meet my brother at the beach but returned promptly for a family emergency.

It was the fact of hypothetically being in midlife that inspired me to finally wrestle my guitar into submission this summer. It was now or never. I’d procrastinated for far too long. My attempts at learning to play never really took off because there was still plenty of time. And each time that I gave up I rationalized that I could finish up my life without learning the guitar. But now I teach the very young and it’s bringing back that old pesky memory of watching Paula and Carole playing guitar on the television show, The Magic Garden in the 70’s. Back then I decided that’s who I wanted to be when I grew up- a laid back, cheerful singing woman who played the guitar while children sat mesmerized. Which is why I ended up in this sudden crisis. It turns out it’s hard to transform a perpetually slightly anxious nature into a breezy and chill one overnight. Or even a whole summer. Especially at this late stage. Is it even possible?

In the small hot room, Joe, the guitar teacher, looks at my guitar.

“Why don’t you take it out. Tell me about your guitar history.”

And all of this is hard to summarize so I bring up the most concrete problem of them all, the one Joe is likely to understand: playing bar chords. (And also keeping rhythm and then, if all went well, keeping rhythm while singing. Paula and Carol made it look easy, even on a garden swing.)

“My goals are simple. I just want to play a couple songs with the kids.”

And when I said it aloud it did seem straightforward and simple but then he wanted to see me hold the guitar and strum a chord. Old panic returned – I was suddenly ten years old with my piano teacher asking me to play whatever had been my piano homework and not being able to do it. It was a combination of not having practiced and also performance anxiety. How could this not have changed in forty years? My nervous system hadn’t righted itself. Now I faced the real problem -in order to be a chill guitar player you have to start off chill. Maybe as a kid, I’d assumed that playing the guitar made one relaxed. And relaxed was actually the thing I wanted to be. My fingers stumbled.

“Rhythm isn’t intuitive to me,” I explained. “I’m not good on the spot.” But I bored even myself with explanations, apologies. I longed to escape the same tired circle.

Joe began to play his guitar. And then showed me shapes and ways to warm up my fingers. Explained some things ‘up and down the fretboard,’ how chords work.

“Am I going too fast?” I shook my head because even if he went slower it wasn’t going to make a difference in that moment. It was like looking at IKEA directions. I needed time to absorb. Bite-size pieces. A night’s sleep. I nodded my head, a well-practiced trait, while mentally leaving the small hot room and trying to change my dream.

It’s weird how ambition can evaporate on the precipice of uncertain growth. Questions abound. What if I fail, again? What happens if it’s a waste of time, of money? Past experiences of failure hold power. In the moment, failure can be more comfortable than success.

But the hour went by. And I was actually able to do some strumming patterns that he gave me. I sensed Joe’s relief. I packed up my guitar and it seemed heavier than when I came in. Maybe bar chords were going to be the easy part. It was letting go of the backstory that would take time.