Memoirs of a Flower Child by George S Geisinger (best novels ever txt) 📖

years, but I honestly never liked football, and I was not too much more excited about marching in parades, after the first show or two when I was in the seventh grade up in Pennsylvania.
My buddy who was going with me to the high school chorus director's house to drink beer, was the preacher's son at the Methodist Church, where my family went. He was an incurable rebel, and a rabble rouser. He enjoyed his beer so much, it eventually cost him a terminal case of cancer. He died at the age of 47 from cancer, just like that. But he and I did a lot of wild things together over the years.
We rode around on our bicycles going hither and yon, making mischief, and when we were old enough to drive, we bought bee-bee guns to carry around in our old cars and shoot at things we could find to shoot at. The cars were provided by our folks in those days, but the mischief was all our own, and we would shoot birds, the udders of cows in various pastures, and kill chickens when their owners weren't looking, etc, as we drove around in the back country roads, until we almost got in trouble with the law.
One man caught us taking a bead on the udders of some cows one day, from the windows of one of our old cars, produced a mike for a two way radio, but my good old pal was able to talk our way out of trouble at the last moment. We had little regard for wild life at that time, other than our own wild lifestyle. We went away to college with the optimism of youth, but he was more interested in making money than getting a higher education. He dropped out of school without finishing his freshman year, bought another old car, and got a bachelor apartment. That apartment was, loosely speaking, a wildlife sanctuary all its own.
I had gone 500 miles away from home on the written endorsement of that same high school chorus director, who had become not only a father figure, but also a mentor to me, and sent me off to be a music education major at his own lama mater, with his written letter of recommendation to the faculty, where he had gotten his master's degree in music education. At the very least, it provided me with a student deferment from the draft, keeping me out of the Vietnam War, till my health eventually failed bad enough to get me a permanent deferment from all military duty.
The summer after my freshman year in university, my trumpet professor arranged that any of his students who wanted to go, could meet him, just off Times Square, New York City, to study trumpet with a specialist in trumpet which he knew personally from this own studies over the years.
The specialist had a tiny studio, right off Broadway in the midst of Times Square, with a few chairs and one long table on the second floor of a dilapidated building which would never draw one's attention, unless they were purposely looking for it. I noticed there were small, oblong cardboard boxes under the table, and one day I asked the man what was in the boxes. At which point he took hold of one, brought it up on his lap, and took out the most beautiful, brand new, top-of-the-line trumpet I have ever seen.
It was a beautiful French Benson, Meha Trumpet, with a medium-large concert bore and a jazz bell. He put his own mouthpiece in it, and played with such authoritative power, I got chills up & down my spine. He volunteered to front the horn to me, with the casual arrangement that I could send him $300 through my university trumpet professor any old time I could get the money together.
One must remember here, that I was a 19 year old university student with no savings and no job. With the reckless abandon of my youth, I accepted his terms, bought a gig bag to carry my new treasure home in, and boarded a Greyhound Bus for home, to get away from that terrifying war zone of an overwhelming downtown big city environment, and went home to cast my latest debt on my unsuspecting mother when I arrived home.
The price of the instrument had been a wholesale arrangement with someone the New York trumpet teacher knew, bringing him imports off various cargo ships and airplanes, like the horn I got, and mother got a significant discount on a very excellent instrument for my future career as a trumpet player.
One of mother's friends eventually told her she should have let me go to jail. I don't think the woman was joking.
As I mentioned earlier, my university days were happening during the Vietnam War era, and I was a flower child, growing my hair, smoking pot and dropping acid, by the time I was a sophomore at the university. I was not the sort of person who could do that sort of thing and continue to function normally at the same time.
I learned quite a bit about music theory, and how to play the trumpet. But I found my health could not sustain my abuses of myself, and I found myself hospitalized and eventually had to drop out of school, ending up in a series of hospitalizations and stays in institutions for many years, before I eventually straightened myself out somewhat.
But I never did forget the wonderful things I learned about playing the trumpet, and I had that wonderful instrument for many years, as long as mother had a place to keep the horn for me, or however long I had a place to keep it for myself, either one, and I was always enjoying having my trumpet, as I always enjoyed having my guitar, but that's another story.
Of course, there had been many years of playing my horn in marching and concert bands, brass ensembles, and the like, but the one occupation I enjoyed the most was playing my trumpet for the various churches I attended over the years.
I enjoyed using my transposition skills, such that I would not have to write out the trumpet parts for the church services ahead of time. I could easily play the hymns and whatnot by my advanced understanding of how to handle the instrument, and the people in the various churches where I worked my labor of love with my instrument throughout the years, were very appreciative and kind to me. I felt like somewhat of a celebrity with my trumpet, from time to time. People would give me the nicest compliments, and were very good to me about my advanced, well educated playing.
They treated me like the professional I was trained to be, and I never cared that I was never paid for my services. I was more than happy to be able to utilize my talent and expertise to be of use with my instrument.
Eventually, I came down with emphysema from too much smoking. To make matters worse, I developed health problems with my front teeth in my lower jaw, and around the time these issues were coming to bear on me, right and left, I sold my horn to a music store for far less than it was worth, and found myself, as I had anticipated, completely unable to continue to play the trumpet at all, not even as a curiosity for another person who happened to have a trumpet in their home or whatnot.
Even so, I have many pleasant memories of having a trumpet and being able to play so well for so many years. Whenever I miss the instrument, I can remember all the wonderful times I had with it throughout so many wonderful years of my life.

Guitar
Chapter 5

I was at a friend's house from my church one evening when I was 14 years old, and found an old guitar in a corner. Asking if I could mess around with it for a few minutes, and I not only got permission to play with it while I was there, but she gave me the instrument outright by the end of the evening, without charging me a cent. It was a gift.
I had a guitar, and I was fascinated.
I had been a trumpet player and singer ever since I can remember, and this old six string guitar had possibilities written all over it. Since the piano never yielded to me, and I really did want some kind of accompaniment to my voice at my disposal, or at least an instrument with harmonious possibilities, I was determined to conquer the guitar, and set to work right away, doing all sorts of experimentation’s with it, until my fingers bled by the second day I had the thing in my possession.
It had steel strings on it when I got it, but somebody told me pretty quick that that particular instrument was made for nylon strings, and steel strings were just not good for that design of guitar and would only ruin the action, sooner or later, by warping the neck with too much tension. I changed over to nylon strings, and found my guitar far more easy to play with much more ease and comfort, for much more rehearsal and experimentation time without any of the cutting and bleeding I'd gone through in the first place.
It was the 60's at that time, and was a perfect time to be picking up the guitar without having any kind of formal lessons. Seems like everybody was playing guitar in those days, and all you had to do was carry one around, and keep your eyes and ears open. If you had any musical talent whatsoever, you could figure out the guitar by osmosis, just as easily as spending a lot of money on lessons. I had plenty of musical talent.
I was a natural on guitar.
Even though I began by learning a few chord patterns for a few songs at the beginning, I was far more interested in learning how to do melodies and harmonies with the instrument, finger picking as much as I could, the sooner the better. What's more is that I was far more interested in improvisation than learning someone else’s songs. From the get go, I wanted to write music for guitar. I wanted to be a singer songwriter or composer.
I started writing songs and singing at open mike nights, here and there, but I noticed quickly enough that my lyrics were a little too goofy, so I stopped writing songs with lyrics. I concentrated on writing guitar solos, and eventually had a collection of 45 original solos for classic guitar.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I played throughout high school and university days. I took my guitar everywhere, and was quick to get it out of its case and play for people. I spent years going places like open mike nights at coffeehouses and DuPont Circle in DC to hang out and jam, and I was always somewhere, if it was only in my own room, working out more and more things about how to play guitar.
I took my guitar to summer camp both times I went to summer camp, while I was still in high school. I did everything I could think of to be “Guitar George, he knows all the chords,” as the popular song goes. I still think those guys were writing about me, because me and my guitar were so inseparable for so long