Category Archives: beautiful birmingham alabama

Notes in Bottles Float to the Center of the Universe

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Listen: http://www.jimreedbooks.com/mp3/notesinbottles.mp3 or read on…

Some days at the shop, my visitors remind me of notes sealed in bottles.

Each customer brings a message to me. Often, the customer is not even aware.

But I see the message and treasure it.

Some examples of messages plucked from bottles that floated to the center of the Universe, which is what Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories is, most definitely:

1. One reader tells me how he discovered his first John D. MacDonald book by accident, while staying at a rat trap motel back in the 1980′s. Since MacDonald was so good at describing the underbelly of Florida night life through the eyes of its movers and victims, it was the right time. I sell the customer a bio of MacDonald, wishing I had read it first. Travis McGee was one dude.

2. A good ol’ boy browser noses about with his wife, and manages to do something any ventriloquist would envy. He talks without touching his lips together. You’d have to be there, if you don’t already know what I’m experiencing. “All right” becomes “awe ITE” and “yeet yet?” is actually “Have you eaten yet?” and so on. He was a cool cat back in high school. His ducktail has thinned.

3. Another junkin’ couple cruises the shop, and the male partner expounds on his store of imcomplete knowledge: “See that Ray Bradbury book? You know, he created Star Trek. He’s dead now.” 92-year-old Bradbury is not in great health but he’s still happy to be alive, according to all reports. Don’t know whether the late Gene Roddenberry is happy.

4. One more curiosity-seeker walks around with his pal and is heard to say, “With all them computers, people ain’t even gonna need books no more.” Employee Marie Peerson overhears this and reports back. She, too, is entertained by messages in bottles, even if the bottles sometimes leak and make soggy the messages.

5. A large baseball-capped man is awed by the life-size stand-up of Elvira, Mistress of the Cleavage, or whatever her stage name is. “She got me through my formative years,” he chuckles.

6. One silent customer forces me to read his mind, as he looks at an old publicity photo of Lauren Bacall. “Does she feel as pretty as she looks?” and, studying a Rolling Stone Magazine with Tina Turner thereon, “Does she do it like she dances?” I distract myself from further mind-reading. As Bugs Bunny said, “Enough is enough, and too much is plenty!”

7. One enthused customer is everywhere at once, overwhelmed at the variety of literary treasures she’s unexpectedly finding in the shop. Her shoes defy gravity, and she finally purchases more than she intended. I wish for a moment that I possessed a remote control that would allow me to replay her energy for the inspiration of other customers.

8. A happy young man picks a leatherbound Robert Louis Stevenson collectible book for his library and is already looking forward to the next visit. Yet another collector spends the entire day carefully deciding upon which century his next selection will time-travel from. He loves it all.

9. A Lincoln-conspiracy scholar has me order two more obscure assassination study volumes for his collection. He and his wife are always smiling and satisfied when they leave. Wish I could bottle them, but they are already bottles, and I their opener.

So it goes.

Anybody anywhere anytime who claims the old-book business isn’t fascinating and educational and riveting just hasn’t dared to take the time to come in, spend an hour or two, and allow the tomes of yore to whisk them away to better lands and imaginations

(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

Nobody Ever Gets Out of the High Chair

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Nobody Ever Gets Out of the High Chair
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To become a bartender or a waiter, you don’t have to have a PhD in psychology or social work, but that doesn’t matter, because your customers think you have a PhD in psychology or social work.
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In other words, in a bar or a restaurant, people often revert to infantilism and look to the barkeeper or waitress as confessor and adviser.  We DEPEND on these people to make us forget the day’s troubles…we depend upon them to act as substitutes for those long ago folks in our lives who fed us and made us feel secure.

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Bring back the eateries of my youth!
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In memory yet green, I can still walk into all kinds of restaurants that used to exist in Tuscaloosa, and I can still get well fed with Food for Thought, even though the restaurant may be long gone and dearly departed.
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In the 1960’s, as a skinny bespectacled radio and TV announcer, I used to take myself and wife to the restaurant beside the Moon Winx Motel and eat an enormous filet mignon with baked potato and goodness knows what else, for under $2.00 on Friday night.  That neon partial-moon still winks at me in my imagination, and I’ve always regretted that I never spent a night there, with that glow leaking around the curtains.
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In the 1940’s, I used to be hauled by Mother and Sister to H&W Drugs when it was right across the street from the Bama Theatre.  There, we would eat the known universe’s best danged chicken salad sandwiches on toasted light bread cut in two, glugged down with soda fountain Coca-Cola.  I can still taste that wonderful oniony flavor and would give just about anything to have one of those sandwiches right this minute.

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We used to drive past the Teapot Diner when I was little, but I never got to eat there.  It would have been an exciting thing to do–eat inside a teapot!  Then, to cap it off, what a treat it would have been to spend the night in the Wigwam Motor Court toward Bessemer!  Wonder what kind of food THEY served?

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Some of the best dining I ever had was while standing on the concrete floor of my grandfather’s store in Peterson, R.L. MCGEE GEN MERCHANDISE, and eating some ice cream washed down by a Grapico, flavored with love and affection from my grandmother Effie and Uncle Brandon and the postmistress, Aunt Gladys.

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The best loaded cheeseburgers I ever had were from the Soup Store cafeteria in the Student Union Building at the University of Alabama, where I worked as an announcer for the public radio station.  Back in the early sixties, I’d put on a long symphonic work for the listeners, then dash down to the Soup Store, grab a burger and a Coke and some chips, and rush back upstairs, hoping against hope that the LP vinyl recording hadn’t gotten stuck in the meantime.

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That juicy cheeseburger would be just right, right about now.

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The best food I could have would be in my parents’ home on Eastwood Avenue long about Sunday evening, when the refrigerator still held cold left-over fried chicken and potato salad and Pepsi Cola.  What would I give to experience that again!

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And so on.

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What are YOUR memories of great food in great places? Let me hear from you.

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Just remember: it’s not the food, you know. It’s the circumstances.

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When I was feeling safe in a safe little town with a safe little family in a safe little neighborhood, anything I ate was memorable.  When I was playing Shostakovich on the big turntable and drinking soft drinks and scarfing a cheeseburger on campus, life couldn’t possibly have gotten any better for that moment.  When I was Downtown ready to go see a picture show, eating chicken salad with my mother and sister, I was in safe haven.

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When I could walk across main street, all the way from my job at WJRD, to S.H. Kress on the other side, and eat a plate lunch for less than a dollar in the 1960’s, I knew life was only going to get better.

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Back then we could sit at Pasquale’s on University Boulevard and gossip and bloat for hours, we could go to York’s Grocery Store on 15th Street and load up on snacks, we could go across the street from city hall and sit and sip with mayor Hinton and other reporters after City Council meetings…and, even before that, way back in the 1950’s, I could take part of my lunch money at Tuscaloosa High School, purchase one of those heavy, yeasty rolls at the cafeteria, grab a half pint of Perry Creamery’s Pasteurized Homoginized milk, and hang out with the other nerds and geeks I loved: Patricia Gresham, Pat Flood, Jon Charles Palmer, Barbara Casson, Dot Jones, Jerry Hudson, Doug Bleicher, Arthur Voss and so on.  Then, I could take the unspent part of my lunch money across the street after school to Parkview Drugs and spin that rack of paperback books and get something new and exciting to read.

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Every meal is a lasting memory, when you’re young. From my earliest recollection of rubber-nipple-bottled milk and my first birthday cake (all over face and body), to my last meal just a few second agos (crunchy fake tacos and Diet Coke), every meal carries a memory to pull out of the file on a future lonely day, every meal triggers a memory of a wonderful eating experience I had a decade ago or a half century ago.

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If I were back in that wooden high chair right now, on my first birthday, knowing what I know now, I would still stick my face and fingers into that white icing and laugh with delight at the prospect of recalling it some 70 years later

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(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed

http://www.jimreedbooks.com