Diamond in the Rough Read Online Free PDF

night. He would let me out in the morning and drive me to school, where he and my mother would take turns waiting outside each of my classrooms and walking me to the next one.
    Given their strict midwestern upbringing, and what had to have been the limitations of their youth, my parents didn’t have a lot of resources available to them regarding a child like me. Nowadays we’ve got kid shrinks galore and private schools and Ritalin, but back then it came down to a battle of wills. Not giving up without a fight became my fallback position, even after I was long gone from my parents’ jurisdiction.
    My parents did send me to a therapist, but of him I recall very little. What seemed to help the most was my father’s telling me that if I would sew my own clothes, he would buy me all the fabric I wanted. I’d never had all of anything I ever wanted before, and I loved clothes—I still love clothes. And thanks to Mom, I could sew. I’d watch the clock at school as the day wore on, counting the minutes until three-thirty, when Mom would take me to the fabric store and I could indulge myself. I got into a matching-bolero-and-skirt phase, and I bought tweedy wools and lawn stripes and would work up in my mother’s sewing room after school as the winter days grew darker, until I was called down to dinner.
    I fell in with some girls at school—Gwen Geyer, Gail Parrish, and Peggy Cochran. They thought I was strange but befriended me anyway. I was the kid who didn’t want to go to school, whose parents had to accompany her to class. But between therapy and the sewing and the girls, I began to be able to tolerate Lincoln Junior High. I was allowed to stop going to therapy. It was enough that I was sent. There would be plenty more to come anyway.
    In the spring, with all the determination I could muster, I managed a perfect attendance record, wearing the bright paisley peasant dresses I’d made during that season in hell. The homeless girl was home again, at least for a while.

3
    She Opened a Book

    Geoff playing the guitar I learned on, 1963
    I live on a dream, it came to me when I was young.
    When I was fourteen, I designed my first album cover. It was a pencil drawing of two eyes, one open and one closed, with a tear falling from the closed eye. I thought it was very deep.
    The guitar had permanent residence at the foot of my bed, and when trouble came in the form of panic or pain, I reached for the guitar. I really turned a corner when I started to play. I didn’t have to be in the church choir or sing along to a record with a hairbrush microphone anymore. I could produce something totally complete with my voice and the guitar. I found my instrument and, along with it, another part of myself. I was becoming a musician.
    I learned “This Land Is Your Land” and understood by ear the general relationship of a key and the basic one, four, and five chords that went with it. With the help of a Mel Bay guitar book, I taught myself chords by attempting to play “This Land Is Your Land” in every key. I learned to play on a Harmony guitar with four strings, and then my parents got me a six-string Yamaha one Christmas. The first song I recall figuring out on my own—and this is infinitely embarrassing—was a Great Shakes commercial:
    Any place can be your soda fountain now,
    With Great Shakes, new Great Shakes.
    Mix it up with milk and make a real thick shake,
    With Great Shakes, new Great Shakes …
    It had sort of a Beach Boys–meets–Peter, Paul and Mary feel to it, and I confess to being somewhat smitten. Thankfully, I soon progressed to tackling some Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Judy Collins. I suppose I could have learned these songs on piano, but the guitar was better. “Blowin’ in the Wind” on piano was so cheesy. The same goes for “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” When I got home from school, I’d eat some ice cream or saltine crackers and peanut butter, talk on the phone, write poetry. Then I’d play the guitar, in