August 10, 2011

The weather has finally cooled down. It has been a really hot, humid summer and the cooler air is so refreshing. Not to mention it helps one to sleep better...at least for me.

Ever so often, I will look for people on the Internet from my past. Folks I have lost touch with, even if they are people I only dealt with in my life for a short time. One such person was a guitar teacher named Dan DeVries. When we lived in Lansing, Illinois, I had the desire to try to learn to play guitar the right way. I had self taught myself as a teenager, pretty much just learning cords and strumming. My dream had always been to learn finger-pick style guitar. This lead me to Dan. I tool lessons for about a year...never really getting the hang of it. Then, Dan went through a nasty divorce and he moved over by Valparaiso and began teaching for a store there called Front Porch Music. Dan was about my age. We lost track of him after a few years, but heard that he was doing well at Front Porch and was a much sought after teacher.

This past week, I looked him up on-line. On the Front Porch website there was no listing of him at all. I tried a google search, but the only info I could find was a blurb on a guitar collectors website. This website featured guitars and why that particular guitar was special. One guitar the collector mentioned as having been owned by the "late" Dan DeVries. And that Dan had "let the beloved guitar go near the end".

I sent an email to Front Porch, then, enquiring about Dan. I learned that he had died in 2002. That was almost 10 years ago. They did not reveal the cause of his death, but the little blurb at the collector's website leads me to believe he must have died from a fast moving cancer or something like that.

Not really sure why I'm writing about that here. It was a bit of a shock to discover this, even though it was not someone I was close to. I just remember Dan as being an excellent musician, excellent teacher and a really, really nice guy. And it also makes you realize...life is precious. And you just don't know when the Lord will call you home to him.

Since he died almost 10 years ago, I could not find any pictures of him at all on the Internet. Just the one picture of a guitar he used to own and must have sold right before he passed.