Listen to Jim’s audio podcast:
http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his diary here:
JOTTING DOWN THE IMAGINARY INVISIBLES
Underneath a scraggly neighborhood tree, the tree that drops small red berries, berries impossible to eat but just perfect for squeezing and squirting red streaks across face and body during playtime war games, I sit. I sit here beneath the branches and leaves and whittle a bit with my Hopalong Cassidy penknife…whittle a small loose branch…whittle nothing in particular…whittle away, watching the wood decrease in size…whittle and whittle, leaving notches here and there as token memories of this childhood day that is passing so rapidly, so rapidly.
The notches on the shrinking wood represent things of utmost importance in my thus-far short life, way back here in the early times of youthful existence.
This notch next to my left thumb represents the recent departure of my two best friends, Monk and Deebie. You were unable to see them because they were visible only to me. We had great times together but now they exist as a notch and a deep memory.
A longer notch honors my baby brother, Ronny, who is at last old enough to be my daily playmate and fellow conspirator. Ronny will show up soon and sit next to me beneath the red berry tree. He will search for four-leaf clovers while my mind meanders notch by notch.
Many years later, when Ronny and I are ancient grownup children living far apart, we will reminisce and fondly cherish these days when there is for a moment nothing more important than juicy berries and pocket knives and shards of wood and patches of shade and four-leaf clovers.
As we age and mellow, our memories of childhood will become more vivid, more detailed, more nuanced. And we will come to realize that we were lucky, so lucky, to have been children protected by parents and family and neighbors and relatives…protected just enough so that for a short and precious time, we could safely deploy our vivid imaginations, gently express our best intentions, take time to smell the Johnson grass and red dirt, spend aimless hours observing spiders and ants and worms and crickets and frogs as they wended their way through the quiet and unpolluted landscape.
Nowadays, instead of whittling my memories, I jot them down in this Red Clay Diary, where they will exist until someone finds them and reads them or discards them. That’s the way it goes, this stuffing bottles full of notes and tossing them into the cosmos. They might survive. They might be lost. They might evaporate. But, so what? The greatest pleasure has already been experienced, the pleasure of re-living good times in memory ever fresh, the pleasure of taking a moment to relish the fact that, among the chaos of daily living through the years, there were and are good things, things worth grasping and mulling over and clinging to…and passing along to you, the next whittler
(c) Jim Reed 2018 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast