I broke my fingernail last week. My pointer finger, one of the four in my right hand, which I need to pluck guitar strings with. A friend downplayed its importance by mumbling, “Why don’t you use a flat pick then, like other guitarists do? Truth was, in more than 40 gig years, I’ve never learned to properly use one. They always flew off my hand mid-song. I woke up on gig day as a cartoon light bulb lit up in my head. Its dialogue bubble said, “Why not buy one of those plastic finger picks used by old schoolers like yourself instead?” And things snowballed from there.
When I informed the missus at breakfast I was leaving early to look for guitar finger-licking picks, it set into motion a slight buzz inside our house of three and in an instant, we were turned into a search party pronto. Didn’t figure that’d just be the perfect excuse for everyone to escape the noonday heat. So off our posse went.
By the day’s end, I got my pick alright, we checked the mall out, came out with additional groceries plus some loot, and my son finally sated his craving, those buy-one-take-one double cheeseburger with black pepper toppings to boot. All because of one twenty-peso finger pick. When it rains, it pours, they say. For me, it’s just like opening a cabinet and an avalanche of crammed assortments comes pouring out.
At the gig night, a former classmate and his college ex-sweetheart and now wife turned up, serving as another topping to our music set, made comfortable by my new finger pick. Even as we haven’t seen each other in years, any conversation about school days, they be high school or college, is always priceless.
Then, at one table of the folk house where I sat for a while, the topic gravitated towards a fellow’s choice of work; leaving behind his job as a mechanical engineer and opting instead to becoming a performing artist, a long-time dream. In that very instant, the words of Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender” had begun playing in my mind:
“…caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender…”
When I finally got home, a brief moment of contemplation came over me. Does everyone ever ask themselves if their life choices were ever worth it? Practically all my classmates were either doctors, lawyers, and successful business people. Once dipped my fingers into a nine-to-five job too, many years ago, but was pulled up slowly by a magnetic tractor beam to where I and a few refer to as one road less travelled. Broken nail, unbroken dreams. It’s never good to regret one’s choices. Just have to make them work.
