Crazy in Love Read Online Free PDF

movie. “The movie theater awaits us.” Arm in arm, Rachel and I marched out of the kitchen.
     

Chapter 3
     
    It was almost entirely by accident that I first became interested in songwriting. One night, when I was still living in Boston, I was baby-sitting for some friends of my parents, the Clarkes. I remember that I was supposed to be studying for a math test the next day. But logarithms aren’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world, and after a couple of hours of staring at those log charts with thousands of numbers on them and doing all those dull practice problems, I decided to chuck the whole thing, at least for a little while.
    I turned on the TV and started channel-surfing, looking for something that would be more interesting than “log 387.” That shouldn’t be too difficult, I know, but all I could find was news shows. I had something a little more entertaining in mind than weather reports and film clips of diplomats shaking hands with each other. Finally I stumbled upon the Public Broadcasting sta tion—you know, educational TV. And there was this man teaching guitar.
    From what I can recall, the guy was a bit lacking in the personality department. But one thing was for sure: he made it look as if playing the guitar was as easy as ... well, easier than doing logarithms. I quickly cased the Clarkes’ living room, but not surprisingly, there were no guitars around. But there was a tennis racket in the hall closet, thrown in among the rubber boots and hangers that had fallen off the rod.
    The tennis racket was warped and frayed, and I don’t think it would have been much good on the courts. But it made a perfect guitar. I remained glued to the set for the next twenty minutes or so, the fingers of my left hand wrapped around the handle as I copied the man on the TV screen, my right hand strumming the strings of the racket. I guess it would have looked sort of weird if anyone had wandered in, but the kids I was baby-sitting were busy tying each other up, or whatever it was they were doing up in their room.
    I kept on watching that show, every week for the next month. I had to leave behind the Clarkes’ makeshift guitar, but tennis rackets seem to be one of those things that families always have lurking in some closet somewhere. They’re like safety pins and bobby pins: you never actually buy any, but somehow they’re always around when you need them. So I found an old tennis racket up in the attic, in the same trunk where I’d found my redheaded grand mother’s diary, and starting strumming away.
    I guess I did look pretty pathetic. I didn’t realize that anyone was even aware of what I was doing, but mothers have eyes in the backs of their heads. On my birthday Morn presented me with a huge, bulky gift—and sure enough, it was a guitar. A real guitar, one that made sounds and couldn’t be used at Wimbledon for anything other than playing music.
    I think I progressed faster on the real guitar than I had on the tennis racket, although it’s impossible to tell. Not only did I watch my weekly lessons on television; I bought myself a book of songs with little charts to show the chords that went with them and started to learn to play actual music. The very first song I ever played from start to finish was “The Streets of Laredo.” Now that’s a song you don’t hear too much anymore, outside of rodeos and camp fires on the cattle range, and I rarely get requests for it. But for me it was a milestone, and true inspiration. I could play real music!
    The funny thing about playing the guitar is that writing your own songs seems almost inevitable. Once you start teaching yourself to play the stuff you’ve heard on the radio and your record albums, you realize that most songs are made up of only three or four chords. The same three or four chords. That’s an earth-shattering discovery, since once you figure that out , you can start putting little tunes together without even trying very hard.
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