Fingers Don’t Fail Me Now

Daily writing prompt

What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?

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I’m not quite back to practicing guitar every day, but five days a week is not bad. The fingers are old, like me, and warm-up exercises help keep me from either the chiropractor or the physical therapist. I’m not running scales yet for warm-up. I find them very effective, but boring, so I run blues riffs in E, they span about half the neck, make me stretch out, and sound like something. OK, I don’t always hit the right note yet, but it’s beginning to pull together.

The night before last, I pulled out a bunch of old scrawled papers with some of my truly awful songs on them. The only reason I did not torch them was sentiment. They have to be awful, I couldn’t remember the melody lines, and the sentiments are mawkish. Old love songs, of course. Maybe they were why I had so many failed romances? In any case, as I practice, little Sabrina, one of my cats, seems to fawn over my renditions of the old material. Oh, she wanted a snack. It was ten p.m.

I did make it all the way through singing my magnum Opus, ” The High Society rag.”This was a song I wrote about my misadventures in Philadelphia. I actually enjoyed it and will put it in a potential set list, if this goes that far. Needless to say, the environment for me at grad school was not a happy one. I’ll take a kick at it any chance I get.

Right now, my left hand is cramping, and I have to do some flexing exercises. Gotta take care of the goods for playing.