I bought my last guitar in 1989. I’d sold my good guitar about six months before that — I had bills to pay and cash was short — but I needed something I could plink on from time to time.

Back then, I bought a used Yamaha dreadnought on the cheap. I knew it would sound good and would take a beating, and I didn’t need all of that filigreed crap that you saw on more expensive instruments. It did indeed sound good and subsequent unintentional tests did indeed prove it could take a beating. However, it had a neck like a log and action that was far too high for my crappy skills. In addition, because of its size, I felt more like I was playing around the guitar than actually playing guitar.

And thus, over time, I became less and less interested in playing the instrument. I’d occasionally pull it out and jam a bit with buddies, but that faded over time and I became a once-every-quarter guitarist. My skills, which were always poor, turned to rust. Meanwhile, my proficiency on the harp kept going up and I got regular work as a harmonica player. I’d found my instrument.

But the guitar called me from time to time. There’s no way around it: You play a song with a guitar, but you just play along to a song with a harp. There are times when you just want to play a tune and that’s when you need a guitar.

So last year, on a whim, I bought a Washburn Rover travel guitar. The neck wasn’t like a log; the action wasn’t so high that I kept burying my fret hand in the spaces between the strings; and I almost immediately enjoyed playing the guitar again.

I’ve gotten somewhat better since then, although I’ll make no major progress until/unless I get a lot more disciplined and probably take lessons. The Rover will get another workout when it heads with me to Cayamo in a little more than a week now, but it sounds more like a banjo than a guitar in many ways — an inevitability, given the size of the body. It’s basically good for exactly what it’s designed to do: Act as a guitar substitute for those times when you can’t haul around a bulky instrument.

But I wanted a decent ‘real’ guitar, and thus, the search began for a new box. I wanted something that sounded like a real guitar, although I was willing to give up the dreadnought’s bottom end in exchange for a smaller size, and I wanted something with lower action (which can hurt tone but vastly improves ease of play). Finally, it had to be relatively cheap for a quality guitar.

Eventually, I decided to acquire a parlor guitar — a once-common guitar size that faded in popularity over the years as big loud acoustics rose on the sales charts. But the parlors have come back in recent times as modern amplification made the size of the guitar a lot less important — and because the parlors are easier to play.

I narrowed the search to a Seagull Coastline Grand and an Epiphone EL-00. The Epiphone gives you about 70 percent of the quality of a Gibson Blues King at 10 percent of the price, while pretty much any guitar with ‘Seagull’ in its title has a reputation for build quality and tone while not killing your pocketbook.

I ruled out the Washburn and Recording King parlor guitars as being a bit too precious (and expensive), and tossed out the Takamine New Yorker — an extremely well-reviewed guitar by one of the very best guitar brands — as being too pricey, given my skill set.

But I’ve also been doing a little eBay trolling. Some music stores are dumping post-Christmas stock that didn’t move, and sure enough, I found a music store in Indiana that was getting rid of the Takamine for about $200 less than you typically see it in other music stores. In addition, they were tossing in a (presumably crappy) gig bag.

So today I pulled the trigger on my first guitar purchase in 23 years. I think it’s beautiful. We’ll see if it can inspire me to a state of non-crappiness on the instrument. I like to think it’s never too late.

Previously: Another trip around the sun | Hokum home