Trucker Bill and the Good Deed

There was a woman who was a fan of my songs, who out of the blue asked me if she could paint my acoustic guitar, she said she was an artist. This would have been around 1990. That Takamine I bought to replace the Sigma M which was stolen by junkies in Vancouver, not an uncommon experience at that time for a Canadian touring artist. I never liked Takamines, but back then they were everywhere as were DX7s ten years earlier, which I also found hideous. Her name was Cathy and after some time I got it back painted spectacularly. When all my equipment was stolen, two years later from the parking lot of Streetbrother’s recording studio in Mimico where I was producing future member of parliament, Andrew Cash, the thing that hurt the most was losing that guitar because she made it so much more unique and powerful with her brushes. They found the youths who broke into my van, the cops dismissed them as glue sniffers. They retrieved all my rack mount gear and amplifiers from pawn shops, all except the guitar painted by Cathy. So it goes. There was a guy named Bill, a trucker who emailed me last year. He wrote that he bought the guitar years earlier at a pawn shop in Quebec and one day his daughter saw the artist’s signature inside the rosette. Cathy’s name. He googled her and found her in Winnipeg and looked her up during one of his cross country drives, he wanted to give it back to her, he figured it must have a story. When Cathy met him she was surprised and moved. She told him it was my guitar actually, that’s when he sent me the email. Now after some false starts (and one pandemic) we meet next week. Feel like I should call a film crew but I’ll just tell you of the internet.

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