Life, actually…

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AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF SOMEWHERE ELSE

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Gather ’round, dwellers of the Down South village.

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In my personal South, I’ve spent many decades admiring those among us who get things done without exerting much energy.

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Used to be, when I’d enter a chain pharmacy to purchase edibles or toiletries or pharmaceuticals, I’d be greeted with a traditional “Good morning” and a “How can I help you?” exchange. The employee at the counter would take a moment to smile and offer assistance. Said employee would even rush from behind the candy-and-gum displays to personally direct me to the desired product.

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Not anymore.

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Today I duck past the automated doors and check my shopping list. I scan the orderly aisles and see no-one. All is calm and dim except for the looping post-Muzak music.

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I scrounge around trying to find one particular item but wind up back where I started, once more looking for signs of human life. A blinking automated check-out kiosk flirts with me but is clueless as to where things are.

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I hear a faint rustling behind the front counter. I peek around a six-foot chap stick display and spy a person below eye level. She is sitting slumped, staring raptly downward at her palm-held device. She giggles at whatever she is scanning.

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I clear my throat. “Ahem,” I say. (When was the last time you ahemed in public?)

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She looks up, sees me, stares silently. I say, “Could you direct me to…?” She points vaguely toward a back corner and returns her gaze to her lap.

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Hmm, I think.

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“Sorry, I’m not sure where that is. Can you help?”

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She sighs, reluctantly rising from her perch. I pretend helplessness just to see how much she is willing to exert herself for a customer.

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I actually get her to come from behind the counter and direct me down the appropriate lane. I graciously thank her and head to the far reaches.

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When I return to the front counter with items to purchase, the employee is once again in the land of electronic navel contemplation. She mumbles something about my using the auto-checkout thingy but I once again hope to test her abilities.

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“Sorry, I don’t have my glasses. Can’t see the instructions.”

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She does one more dramatic sigh and checks me out at the humanoid assistance booth. I make my usual  pleasant small talk–I enjoy engaging strangers in meaningless exchanges. It’s a Southern thing..

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In her firmly defined tradition, the clerk asks whether I want a receipt. I say Yes just to see her in some kind of motion. I am silently amazed that she gets paid to do this job.

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I obtain my receipt, grab my goodies, retrieve my change and head for the door, wishing her a nice day. She re-slumps and resumes existence in her virtual world.

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I wonder whether the day will come when I grow used to this not-so-brave new world.

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Or am I just being an old fogey?

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You don’t have to reply. I know the answer

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© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary on youtube:

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Life, actually…

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VILLAGE ELDER SPIES MELTING POT

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This modest Down South village attracts a lively melting pot of visitors each and every day.

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I notice this because every guest who enters my town shows me something new and interesting, something old and embedded, something delightful, something dark, something pure and innocent.

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To appreciate these denizens, all I have to do is pay attention. All I have to do is notice. All I have to do is awaken these visitors with a greeting and a kindly chat.

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Just yesterday: a backpacked burly traveler enters the shop, scouring the holdings for  Southern issues, Southern history, Southern stories. He is from Holland and is spending his brief days experiencing this part of our enormous country. We share cultures and talk about this and that. And laugh.

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Just last Thursday: nine high school students in Montgomery sit facing me in a private-school library—er, a media center—and exchange ideas about writing and reading and storytelling. They are vibrant, attentive, filled to the brim with ideas and notions. They are actually listening to me. Now and then, a brightened light appears in their eyes when I say something wise or witty or stupid. This is called Willingness to Learn. They still know how to laugh.

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I am supposed to be teaching them creative writing techniques, but instead I am learning more from them than they will ever know. They may appear as mythical characters in a future story.

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Just a few hours ago I trade pleasantries with a lifelong piano teacher whose enthusiasm for recitals and classrooms never wanes. He tells me that students of the piano are disappearing rapidly. Fewer wish to learn to play the keys, piano stores are declining in number.

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This anecdotal information is puzzling. Will we soon be listening solely to robotized tunes? Musn’t give this a second thought since I do not know what to do about it.

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Just yesterday: the shop windows rattle from extreme bass volumes emanating from passing group motorcyclists. Harmless music made scary by extreme overload issues forth from a parked van. Otolaryngologists will be making fancy incomes from not-long-from-now hearing-loss patients.

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Two people enter the shop, loaded with ephemera from the estate of their late kinsman. They know that I adopt all signs of Southern history buried within the holdings of dwindling estates.

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Smiling customers bring old books for adoption, talkative customers share their love for paperbound stories, kids stare wide-eyed at princess fairytale pages, browsers look for books they are assigned to read, others bring lists of what they really want to read, still others look around for books that will remain unread but will be displayed for us to think they might have read them.

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It is a beautiful day, this day that began with a visitor from Holland. This day that begins and ends in laughter.

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It is a good experience, this life. But only if I take the time to watch and listen. Only if I take the time to exit my self-involvement and engage a willing stranger in harmless dialogue, sharing laughter and concerns.

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H.G. Wells once said, “To laugh is to awaken.”

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Who will you and I try to awaken today

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© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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PARALLEL UNIVERSE

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Trundling north on 20th Street this morning, I flick the right-turn signal and prepare to turn right onto Third Avenue.

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But first a word from the traffic-management cosmos.

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I idle at the intersection while passing traffic bounces and hobbles over yellow-and-black speed bumps.

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Somewhere a vehicle service department chieftain is rubbing hands together in glee, anticipating the sale of one more front-end alignment or tire-balance order.

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When the green light grants permission, I bump and wobble onto Third and head for the bookshop.

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But wait. There’s more.

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Impeding my progress is a red car protruding half into my lane and half into a striped parallel parking space.

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I stop, click the flashers, and prepare to watch the spectacle.

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The red-car driver misjudges her angle and pulls back into the street. Then, backing up to try once again, she attempts to gracefully slide safely into that mythical arena where the car will be six inches from the curb and even-distanced between the cars parked in bookended spaces fore and aft.

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This is the impossible dream of countless drivers.

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Her right rear wheel nudges the curb and climbs halfway up, but her front left-hand fender overlaps the stripes and leaves sparse room for any car—mine, particularly—to pass by.

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The driver opens her door and glances at the asphalt, gauges the markings, tugs on the handle, tries yet again to re-shuffle her position. Cars are lining up behind me.

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Nobody toots a horn, sensing this is not a purposeful impediment, but simply another human trying to master the impossible art of parallel parking.

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In some distant parallel universe, everybody parks perfectly and effortlessly.

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But in this particular universe you can only wonder how anybody anywhere anytime got the brilliant idea that people everywhere would automatically know how to master this procedure.

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After eight more maneuvers, a couple of open-door peeks, the driver gives up and settles for a slightly crooked stance. She’s in a hurry to make an appointment.

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I won’t even go into a description of how she tries and fails to figure out the city’s “app” parking meter system. She finally abandons her vehicle to the predatory rules of a lax bureaucracy and hopes not to be ticketed.

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Meanwhile, I pass by her car and find my own parking space.

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In her honor, I park slightly crooked.

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I pump quarters into a slot, smile and sigh, and begin my workday

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 © Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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WORDS, WORDINESS AND WORDLESSNESS

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The power of the word—printed, dictated or internet-conveyed—is exceeded only by the sometimes powerlessness of that word.

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Is the old expression “power of the printed word” just an outdated hollowed-out phrase?

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Also, have you ever thought about the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” or roughly something like that?

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How can this be true? Words can fall limply to the ground or they can absolutely destroy an otherwise perfectly wonderful day. Depends on who spouts them under what circumstances and/or how they are heard by the hearer.

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One unkind or hostile word can often make me lie down and feel like a speed bump, assuming speed bumps can have feelings.

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Or, worse still, one unkind or hostile word or phrase can set me off like an overgrown firecracker and cause me to react in outrageous illogical ways. Don’t push my button!

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Gazing back through the ages, it looks as if nothing changes. The easily-accessible works and words of Plato or Montaigne or Vonnegut or H.G. Wells or David Grayson seem to support this idea. These thoughty writers talk in amazingly modern terms about the same problems we still mull over.

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They describe the feelings that still hover over me to this day.

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The same impossible odds against the prospect of changing the human race into something nobler—those odds are still at work.

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These wiseguys of old all talk about being human, and their situations seem not one whit different from ours. Evolution works incredibly and painfully slowly.

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So, what good are words, anyhow?

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Well, they certainly are of little use when you want to share them with someone who recoils from your enthusiasm in the same Pavlovian manner they learned to shy away from good literature.

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It’s hard to convince them that you and your words and words of long ago represent the same set of circumstances they encounter today.

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The great sticks-and-stones of history are still available. Through the ages, much has been said that is still true. People back then and people right now, do often have something to say.

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In order to understand words of yore, the narrative must be massaged and re-massaged each generation in order to remain understandable. Just because an oldtime author uses Thou instead of You-all doesn’t mean there’s no wisdom to inspire me. It just means I have to re-translate and update in order to embrace the wisdom and thoughtyness that is there for the taking.

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It is not so much the word that has power—it is the reader, it is the absorber and purveyor of that word who can revive it or destroy it for others.

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David Grayson said, “Nothing, I think, so inadequate as language: to express in words not made by oneself concepts clear only to oneself. Words worn threadbare, sizes too small! How stop a winged idea long enough to express it? Poor, inarticulate man.”

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Enough with my lecturing and ranting.

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I leave you with a word. Try to take it kindly. Try to take it personally. Try not to find a way to get mad at it. Cherish it. Make it yours. Own it.

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This is my word to you: Joy! Bring joy to your words—words spoken, words written. Like soft cottony clouds or sweet cotton candy, they are contagious. They act like bucket brigades, passing along special bits of joyful wordiness, joyful knowledge, joyful instructions for living life better and best.

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Polish those words into newly-gleaming objects designed to inspire and re-inspire.

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What could it hurt?

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Ascend from the speed bump

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© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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LESSON FROM A DOWN SOUTH PLAYGROUND

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“Boy did I just about get smushed by that car!” This is Bob Crutchfield weaving his latest tale. We, his 1950s playmates, hang on to Bob’s every pronouncement. We are standing in the shade of a crooked tree in Bob’s backyard.

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Bob continues, “That car must have been going seventy-seven miles PER hour.” He pauses. Our attention is rapt. “Another seventeen seconds and I’da been a goner!”

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As a fellow kid I am still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a car’s zooming along at such a speed on a small street that barely allows enough length to rev up to anything over twenty.

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I remind myself that this is Bob Crutchfield talking. Every factoid must be reduced to its realistic height when we listen to Bob. He is the neighborhood’s greatest exaggerator.

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We of course do not disapprove of Bob’s wild stories. After all, he is the only entertainment available in the blazing summer sunlight. If we didn’t have Bob, we’d be lying flat on our backs listening to bees, and scratching redbug bites.

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“I been shootin’ matches out of my BB gun,” Bob exclaims. This is profoundly interesting, since we sluggish mates of heavy humidity never think about loading anything but BBs into a BB gun.

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“I bet I can make seventeen matches in a row light up when they hit the sidewalk,” he says, loading and cocking. He’s right—with luck and aim he manages to accomplish two things at once, becoming both marksman and firebug.

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We wimpy kids don’t dare experiment with fire and mortar this way, so Bob is acting out our fantasies. Our parents and overlords disapprove of this kind of behavior, like dodging a speeding car or firing off kitchen matches or swinging from tree vines.

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Mind you, we generally know when Bob Crutchfield is fibbing for fun. He always uses the number seventeen. I finally figure out that seventeen is an ideal number for dramatic emphasis. You can stretch out all three syllables. Much better than a one-syllable number. And seventeen hundred and seventy seven sounds way cooler than any one-syllable number you can imagine.

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My sister Barbara is outraged one day when Bob accidentally shoots her in the leg with an unlighted match. The scandal lasts for weeks. But at least it’s something to talk about in a small world such as ours, where anything happening at all is better than nothing going on.

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Even after the pock mark on Barbara’s skin heals, the incident makes for something to re-tell now and again.

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I hope to this day that wherever Bob Crutchfield wound up, maybe he still carries scandal and harmless drama around with him.

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Just to keep us kids of summer amused, bemused and full of at least seventeen million moments of fond memories

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© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.

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