Catch Jim’s podcast: https://jimreedbooks.com/podcast/

or read the transcript below:

BIRMINGHAM GHOST GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Three disheveled young musicians wander down a century-old hall and through doorless rooms. They are giving me a guided tour of my own bookshop, some twenty years ago when I am located down on 20th Street, just a few blocks away.

“This is where I slept,” one rocker says, staring at the heavily-laden bookcases.

“Yeah, I was across the hall where those old newspapers are,” says another.

“Man, we froze to death some nights in this place,” the third man smiles.

“But we had great parties when we could afford the fixin’s,” the first recalls.

Way back then Reed Books occupied the second floor of this run-down former hotel, once across the street from the location of a vaudeville theatre.

Before I moved the shop into this building, the young performers had crashed in the unheated unaired structure and made it a temporary shelter.

Whizzing through town on their way to a distant gig, they decide to stop by and see where fond memories were once made.

“I wonder if the ghost still lives here,” one muses.

Now they have my attention.

“What ghost?”

“Oh, well, there was a ghost here, and some nights we could all hear it bouncing down the hall,” he says matter-of-factly.

“And we never actually saw it. It just came to visit now and then.”

I ask whether the ghost ever scared them.

“Oh, no, we just let it be.”

Hmm.

After the merry wanderers take their leave, I am left alone in the shop, the shop that suddenly takes on another personality once I learn about the ghost.

Through the years other visitors occasionally mention the same ghost they notice in previous contacts with the building.

My then-employee Craig verifies that he, too, has felt a “presence” when alone among the books.

Today, recalling the ghost of a bookstore long ago flattened and covered over by an apartment building, I wonder a couple of things.

Whatever happens to ghosts when their hauntings disappear? Do they re-locate? Do they remain and roam about, waiting to be noticed?

And why do I never experience the presence of ghosts? Maybe I’m just too skeptical for my own good. It might be fun to encounter such a harmless apparition.

Cruising the aisles of books upon books in today’s bookshop location, I realize that I actually live among thousands of ghosts and ghostly stories and page-turner apparitions. These are ghosts enough for me.

So long, Birmingham ghost. I hope you find places to go bump in the night when you grow weary of lolling about

Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.

WEBSITE

Weekly Podcast: REDCLAYDIARY

Catch Jim’s podcast: https://youtu.be/mTjjrULI7K8

or read the transcript (below)

WAVING FOR PEAS ON A DEEP SOUTH SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Way back when…

My brother Ronny makes me laugh so hard at Sunday lunch that the English peas in my spoon suddenly fly through the air and scatter onto the dining room floor.

Just to keep the insanity going, I suddenly proclaim, “Peas on Earth!” which of course escalates the merry chaos.

Mother remains calm and stares at us till we retrieve all the spilled goods and resume our meal. Dad pretends he hasn’t noticed.

Later this afternoon, back here in the 1950s, Dad takes Mom and us kids on an afternoon drive through the backwoods of Alabama. On the red dirt roads and blue highways, we take delight in counting cows, reading road signs aloud, and waving. And smiling at imagined friends.

Waving and waving back is an important pastime here in the rural countryside. Trading smiles with strangers is a ritual that somehow makes us feel more secure, more at home, more at peace in an otherwise troubled land.

We even wave at pets and farm animals and feral beasts.

We pass front porches filled with smiling wavers, waving smilers. We feel special. For one split second after another, our presence is noted. For one split second after another, we pay attention to the living and the lives that are taking place in unfamiliar neighborhoods.

This is our rolled-down-window view of the real world, not the make-believe world of movies and radio and television and books and church sermons and droning teachers.

Sure, we learn a lot of abstract things by paying attention to media and preachers and instructors, but the real visceral learning comes from reaching out. Waving and smiling never fail to bring spontaneous comradeship and connection.

But this golden Sabbath road trip after family breaking of bread becomes an indelible memory that carries through the years till right now.

I still wave and smile at strangers. Those who pay attention always respond in kind. Those whose eyes are glued to their palms miss the moment, the moment that will never repeat itself.

So, I salute all you smilers and wavers. Without your passing presence I don’t know how I would get through the day in one piece, living in peace, and enjoying occasional spasms of peas on earth

Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.

WEBSITE

Weekly Podcast: REDCLAYDIARY

Catch Jim’s podcast: https://youtu.be/xNEl1aIznMQ

or read the transcript below:

THE DOMINO MATCH THEORY GOES UP IN SMOKE

Jimmy Three lives and breathes in a 1950s Deep South village. Lower your eyelids for a moment and travel back in time with me. Let’s take a look at this young boy named Jimmy Three. He actually exists, both back then and, seventy years later, right now.

There he sits behind the itchy bushes of his front yard on Eastwood Avenue, the stub of a pencil held tight in his teeth. There is a scraggly notebook in his lap. A fizzed-out Pepsi Cola bottle leans against his leg on the uneven red dirt. A box of wooden kitchen matches is at his side, next to two filched cigarettes.

Jimmy Three is a daydreamer who writes down his dreams and ideas and fleeting thoughts and oblique notions. He writes them with his  penknife-sharpened pencil. He hides his papered outpourings in a special place inside the house.

Jimmy Three is looking around to make sure nobody can see him from the street. His Mom is downtown paying bills in person, his siblings are away adventuring. For this moment, Jimmy Three is alone and loving it.

This is his first time to attempt to smoke a real cigarette. Up till now his playtime fantasies consist of unlit pretend smokes—twig cigars, whittled pipes, rabbit tobacco scraps, pantomimed Bogart gestures. Smoking looks so cool to Jimmy Three.

He picks up a Lucky Strike, pokes it into his mouth, pushes open the cardboard drawer and selects one hardwood Phosphorous-tipped stick. He recalls his Mom cautioning him to close the box prior to striking a match, lest the whole shebang lights up.

Now he has met his match and is about to rub it quickly against the sandpapered strip affixed to the Domino label. How will this work? he wonders. Do I take the cigarette out of my mouth to light it or do I risk singeing my eyebrows?

He tries to remove the cigarette from his mouth but OUCH! finds that his moistened lips are stuck to the thin paper. Another lesson learned: Dry your lips before smoking.

The soggy end of the cigarette isn’t fit to use, so Jimmy Three reverses it, placing the untouched part between dry lips. He strikes the match, reassured by the acrid smell, and holds its lighted end to the cigarette.

What to do next? He blows through the Lucky Strike but the tobacco goes cold. Why won’t it remain lit? By now he’s yelling OUCH! Number Two because the match has burned down to his fingertips.

He stomps on the embers. Taking a deep breath, once again scanning his whereabouts to make sure no-one is there to observe his humiliation, he picks up the second cigarette. The first one is a mess shredded useless on the red clay. Here is my final chance to get this thing going, he mutters.

What other way do you smoke a cigarette? Well, maybe I can light up, suck in instead of blowing out, and see what happens. What if I suck the flaming tip into my mouth. Third OUCH!?

Lucky Strike between dry lips, flaming match held to the cigarette tip, he sucks powerfully.

It works. It works so well his lungs suddenly fill with unaccustomed smoke, his coughing spasms seem endless, his tearing-up eyes are blinding, and his entire project is doomed.

Jimmy Three extinguishes the match, shreds the cigarettes, buries all the evidence, returns the Domino Matches to the kitchen and hopes nobody will ever suspect what happened.

Saving the empty Pepsi bottle for deposit return, Jimmy Three goes to his room and nurses the upset stomach he will have the rest of the day…an upset stomach created from the inhalation of Phosphorous fumes and wood smoke and smoldering tobacco and a dash of guilt.

Jimmy Three retrieves his notebook and pencil stub and makes some notes.

And he resolves to move on to less risky experiments, a resolution he sometimes keeps and sometimes breaks. Like the time he climbs the old smokestack near the neighborhood and nearly gets into a whole passel of trouble.

But that story comes later

Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.

WEBSITE

Weekly Podcast: REDCLAYDIARY