Tom guarna the wishing stone1/9/2023 ![]() If you had asked me 10 years earlier if that would have ever happened, because of the circumstances of my life, I’d have said absolutely not.” ![]() “When the smoke cleared and I thought about it after that summer, I felt really good about graduating, really fortunate that I was finally at a place where I did that. As a result, the accomplishment of earning his master’s didn’t hit him at first. Guarna graduated when he was 40 but was unable to attend the ceremony because he was performing elsewhere. My responsibilities in life were completely different than those in their 20s.” “So on the musical side of it, age was a nonissue. “If you have talented musicians together, you will always find bonds, even when you have a pretty wide age gap,” Guarna says. At 38, he was considerably older than the rest of the student body, though equally motivated. Guarna also was accepted to Juilliard, where he earned his master’s degree. When Tom and I play, it’s as if we can talk and answer each other’s sentences.” “Music is a language, and when like minds get together and are well versed in that language, something happens. “A lot of times people don’t really understand the symbiotic relationship that happens between musicians,” says White, 69, who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. And that age, your 20s, is kind of crucial to your development to start and build a career.” “My love of music didn’t stop, but it wasn’t a period where I was able to pursue it and develop as an artist. “Other things were going on in my life that didn’t let me devote quality time - or any time - to pursuing music as a career anymore,” he says. But when it came to creating new music or looking for gigs, the motivation was gone. Through a childhood friend, he got a job working for a courier service and also gave guitar lessons. With his music studies now on hold, Guarna returned to New York to help his family. ![]() When I got the news of what happened, of course I was devastated, but I can’t honestly say that I was completely, completely surprised.” “I was old enough to realize that things weren’t right. “My father had been leading a life a few years prior to that where he was not on a good road,” Tom Guarna says. The man shot him, fled the scene and was eventually captured. On June 15, Vincent Guarna confronted her other boyfriend in her home in Staten Island. For the previous few years, his father’s life had taken a downward spiral in which he battled drug addiction and became involved with another woman, who was also seeing someone else, his son says. That time of discovery came to an abrupt end in June 1989, when Tom Guarna was 21. “I did a lot of practicing and learning in that two-year period.” “There were a lot of teachers out there that I wanted to be close to and learn from,” he says. At 20, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the Musicians Institute, a vocational school.
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