I bought my Ibanez hollow-body electric guitar used in the summer of 1986, and it has followed me from California to Pennsylvania to Berlin to Saarbrücken to Basel. I've only had to have it repaired twice: once when the socket to connect it to an amplifier had a loose connection, and once to get new frets installed. On Friday, I was performing with Twenty Hounds, the group with three students that came together during my Grateful Dead course in the spring, and something else broke: I jumped up and down with excitement after the first song, and my guitar strap broke. That strap had also been with me for forty years. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 November 2026)