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http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his memory below:
ICY HOT ASPHALT SUMMER DAY
Way, way back, on an Alabama summer day…
Hot concrete under tender bare feet makes you dance…first one foot down while the other foot’s up, then the other foot down while one foot’s up.
The only relief comes when you hop onto the cool prickly grass next to the concrete sidewalk, let the green blades slide up between your toes and press against your soles, sigh a loud sigh of relief, pause a moment, then dance right back onto the concrete sidewalk, because that’s the only way you’re going to get to the asphalt road.
Once on the asphalt road, you start dancing again, because asphalt is dark and more heat-absorbent than concrete, only the texture is different and the tarry pebbles make hash marks on your feet when you finally find a bit of shade to stand under where the asphalt is cooler, or at least lukewarm.
The reason you’re standing here on the ridged asphalt is because you can hear the milk truck coming and you have to be right there on the asphalt in just the right place in order not to miss the milkman’s rushed schedule.
Finally, you see the milkman and his vehicle lumbering stickshifty along, creaking to an idling halt while he emerges, lifts a metal tray of thick-walled bottles filled with Perry Creamery’s pasteurized homogenized milk, trots up the sidewalk, not even aware that it’s hot because he has on these thick-soled military shoes made of hard leather, stitched tightly to harder leather.
He clanks the new bottles down on my front porch, picks up the waiting empty bottles, and heads back to the milk truck.
By this time, out of nowhere, several summertime barefoot kids about my age have gathered around the back of the truck, dancing on the hot asphalt and waiting for the treat of the morning: free crushed ice.
The milkman dips his large hands into the trunkful of finely shaved ice supporting the fresh milk bottles, and breaks off hand-sized hunks, doling them out to each streetkid.
We immediately scatter to the hot morning air, sucking our chunks of ice, biting into them and getting the only cool surge of the day, since none of us lives in an air-conditioned home.
Maybe we remember to say “Thank you” to the milkman, maybe sometimes we forget, but we are grateful for this assumed and taken-for-granted small free favor granted us each time the milkman and his freshly produced pasteurized homogenized milk comes our way.
It’s another ritual in our tiny neighborhood, one of many rituals that serve to hold us all together and make us feel somewhat secure, ignorant of what lies ahead way beyond the hot-asphalt smalltown mornings of our very precious and very fleeting childhood
Jim Reed (c) 2018 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast