The accessory

Something was loose in the shipping carton. I clearly heard it shift when I carried it to the kitchen table. Something was moving, something smaller than a guitar in its case. There was no obvious damage to the box, so I slit the packing tape and tipped the contents onto the table. The fabric covering showed lots of old wear and tear, but there were no visible holes or dents. I took a deep breath, popped the latches and raised the lid.

The scarred old Gibson was swaddled within the case with the brown butcher paper David had packed it with for the trip home. I lifted it out, shaking off packing material and holding the guitar under the light. He’d done a perfect job closing the top cracks and reinstalling the bridge. It was whole again with all its history preserved, even the original sunburst finish that had weather-checked to an alligator hide texture.

Still fearing a loose top brace, I shook the guitar gently in my hands. The only sound was the slackened strings slapping the fretboard. Heartened, I tuned it up to pitch, played a couple of chords and smiled. A few hours of playing and it will sound like it should, I thought. I gently tapped on the top and strummed some louder chords. There was no buzz, no rasp or rattle to indicate a problem.

I laid the guitar back into the case to take it to my favorite guitar-playing chair, hoisted it - and there was that noise again. I removed the guitar to shake the case, and my eyes went to the accessory compartment. I raised the lid to find a small black notebook loosely wedged inside.

Strange. I didn’t remember seeing that before. I thought back to when I bought the guitar and what little I knew of it. It had been sitting on a stand in the guitar lesson room of my father’s favorite music store for a long time - I remember seeing it there when I was a kid in the 70s. It was never said, but I got the impression it had belonged to the guitar teacher before Blue, and Blue had been there since the folk revival.

The case had been in a corner with a bunch of other, long-undisturbed cases, but it appeared to be the correct case, an old black number with purple lining that fit correctly. After the owner's death, his son had decided to close the store, and knowing I had always admired the old LG-2, he had offered it to me for a very good price, and he’d been good enough to ship it to me. When it first arrived I looked the guitar over and immediately called David to arrange the repairs and promptly packed it up, case and all, and shipped it out to him. I hadn’t looked in the accessory box because there didn’t seem to be any reason to, at the time.

I looked closer and saw a loose flap of fabric on the bottom of the compartment. Had the little black notebook been hidden under that? A moment’s experimentation showed that yes, the notebook did fit under there. It must have shaken loose in transit.

I gently slid aside the frayed elastic band holding the notebook closed. When I opened it, I saw that apart from the faded pale ruling, the pages were blank. There was a little pocket inside the cover, but there was nothing there, either. I fanned through for a moment, truly puzzled as to why someone would conceal an empty notebook. It was funny - I had considered having the guitar examined under a black light to see if there was any finish overspray. Maybe the black light would have been better used to check for invisible ink. I riffled the pages again and suddenly one page leapt out at me with a single line in neat copperplate script, almost like my grandfather’s handwriting from the 1920s, in old black ink gone brown.

“The beautiful gate,” it read.

I closed the notebook and set it down. The beautiful gate? Intrigued, I picked the book up again and turned back to where I’d read the one line - and for the life of me I couldn’t find it. And I looked, too. I looked at the front and back of each page, then held the pages at different angles, held it up so the light would shine through it - but, no. It was like the words had never been there.

But the words were there. In my head.

I never made it to my favorite chair. I laid the case back down on the kitchen table, pulled out a chair and sat down with the Gibson in my lap.

“The beautiful gate,” I thought. The words felt familiar, but just out of reach. I cheated and pulled out my phone to run a quick search. There it was - Jerusalem, the temple gate called Beautiful, where a man who was lame from birth was carried to beg for alms. Peter and John gave him healing instead of money, and he walked into the temple with them, leaping and praising God.

The beautiful gate. Alms. Healing. Like something detonated by a spark, the images and words burst forth, and my fingers found their way across the guitar to string together chords, grace notes, runs and figures. I felt like I was watching myself from far away. I had never written a song like this. In fact, it was not so much writing a song as writing it down - this song came to me, like it had been waiting for me to be there to receive it.

Only later would I wonder how I had known to write it all down onto a fresh legal pad and not the notebook itself. At the time I was happy just to sing and play, then do it all over again into my phone and send the resulting recording to a number I remembered I had been given. After that, I tucked the guitar away in its case, remembering to put the black notebook back into the accessory compartment.

Maybe a week later, I got the phone call.

“You are not going to believe this, but he loves it. I mean, loves, loves loves it. His manager is kinda torn, because he had all these people lined up for co-writes, but he is insisting on doing this particular song, your song, to the extent that he thinks it should be the opening single. He’s offering you a $20,000 advance on the royalties, that’s how much he loves it. ” There was a pause, then, “He wants to know if you have any more like it.”

I spent a couple of days going through all the notebooks I’ve kept through the years. After that, I tracked down the little boxes of index cards with stray ideas. I trawled through my personal archive of songs and song ideas, looking for just exactly the right words, the right ideas. I needed a new hook, something that would sound fresh and familiar all at the same time.

When that didn’t work, I reached for the guitars I’d always used. I tried the Martins. I dug my old Guild out of the back of the closet. I tried different tunings, I tried using the capo up and down the fingerboard. I even tried to write at the piano, I was that desperate. I was about to call a friend to borrow his banjo when I saw the tattered looking black case in the corner.

The old Gibson was waiting. There is no other word for it. It was sitting there, like some inverted version of prevenient grace, not knocking on doors but waiting for its door to be knocked on, the way it had waited all those years on a stand in the basement of a music store, until the right moment, the right time.

I lifted it out and played an tentative, testing, questing chord. A moment’s tweaking of the high E string rewarded me with that throaty midrange, a lazy swipe of my right thumb brought forth what guitar cognoscenti call the fabled “Gibson thump,” and then I sat still for a moment, just feeling the guitar in my lap.

I looked down at my left hand making a ghostly chord over the fretboard, my right hand like a spider over the soundhole - and then without thought my spidery right hand reached into the case to lift the smaller lid inside and bring forth the black notebook.

I set it down before us, the Gibson and I, and opened it. Blank lined pages. I kept turning them, blank lined page after blank lined page, until I had gone cover to cover. Nothing.

I closed the notebook and sat there for a moment. I closed my eyes and folded my arms around the guitar, breathed in slowly and out slower still.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please.”

Then I opened the black notebook again and saw what was written. I read and re-read the four words written in brown-faded ink that had once been black and committed them to memory. Like any wise and grateful beggar, I remembered to say, “thank you” before closing it again.

Then I reached for the legal pad and a pen and went to work.