"There but for the grace of God..."

Well, there I was, in Nashville, Tennessee, shopping at one of my favorite music stores. Seriously shopping, too. I don't go and just hang out at music stores, I don't grab guitars and plug in and try to impress the passersby with all my hottest licks, and I don't just browse aimlessly. I was looking for some replacement pickups for a Stratocaster.

Now, I am a serious Strat player. I have other guitars, and I use even more on a regular basis. But they are my favorite. I won't go into a long technical list of reasons, I'll just say the stratocaster and I suit each other well. Perhaps because we were born in the same year...

Anyway, there I was. And there were a pile of pickups. Lindy Fralins, Rio Grandes, Lace sensors, Lace "Holy Grails", Fender Custom Shops, Seymour Duncans, DiMarzios, EMGs, everything you could want except Kinmans, they just haven't gotten to the stores here in the States yet. But there were plenty of others. Hundreds, literally. I was totally happy with the pickups on one of my strats, but the other one's pickups just hadn't really aged all that well. They could give me all they had, but it just wasn't quite enough, you know?

So I spent a couple of hours going through them all. There was a set of EMGs I almost bought, and a set of Fralins I almost bought. But I just really like the traditional "real" strat sound, and the Fender Custom Shop hand-wound pickups are the closest you can get. The same materials, same insulation, same scatter-winding technique, made as close to the average original specs as possible, but more consistent in quality than the originals. So I bought a set of "Fat '50s". I got a really good deal on them, too, and besides, the store owed me money on some trade-in boxes from the past. Yep, I done good, and as I walked out of the store I just KNEW I'd be happy with those pickups (I am, too, and also happy I didn't get solder in my eye when I wired 'em up!)...

So I walked out of the store and there was a guy standing there who asked me for spare change. Now I've been panhandled before, and besides, I was a hippy long ago, I know the deal. But this guy... I talked to this guy awhile, and as a musician I have heard all the excuses and b.s. you could want. I know the difference between reality and fantasy pretty good. And this guy's story rang true. He'd hitched from Atlanta looking for work, and knew people in some suburb of Nashville that he was still trying to get to. He didn't have much with him, he was dirty and so were his clothes.

Well, I didn't have much with me, either, not after buying those pickups. I gave him all the money I had, and he went off. It was enough to get him by for awhile, if he wanted it to. Or enough to eat a couple of meals, or enough to get drunk. I don't know what he really intended, that's his choice. All I knew was that my biggest problem that day (aside from surviving the Nashville traffic) was what overpriced music equipment to buy, while his was more of a survival thing.

I've been where that guy was. I've hitched from Gainesville, Florida to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Tennesee, I've been homeless and scrounged around. I've gone hungry, although to see me with my slightly thick middle-aged midsection nowadays you might not believe it. But still, I could relate. And I was ashamed. I wasn't ashamed that I needed different pickups on that guitar, I was ashamed that what I gave that man was just the castoffs I had left. Maybe it was enough, maybe it was just what he needed. But it was just what was left over, it was just trash, like the dumpsters I'd once dived through had been full of.

Except for the grace of God in lifting me out of that poverty and lack I'd still be where that man was, or dead. I haven't dug through a dumpster for a long time... Long enough to forget? God, help me NEVER forget!