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JERRY MUSKRAT HITS A SPEED BUMP
Chapter V of the pulpy-papered book I hold open begins, “If in all the great world there is any one pleasanter than Reddy Fox when he tries to be pleasant, I don’t know who it is. Of course, in that handsome red coat…”
“Jim!”
I jump two inches vertically when I hear this call “Jim!” and the book snaps shut and I am torn from the multi-textured world of Jerry Muskrat and Reddy Fox, into the reality of my mother’s voice.
“Jim!”
“Coming!” I respond, scrambling to my bare feet on the hardwood floor of our tiny asbestos-shingled home on Eastwood Avenue in 1950 Tuscaloosa.
I trot into the kitchen where Mother stands holding an overflowing metal trash can. She has a no-nonsense look that I dare not challenge.
The meaning of her stance is clear.
It is my chore to “take the garbage out” and transfer its contents to a much larger receptacle in time for city workers to rumble by and transfer its innards to a large and noisy truck.
I have failed to perform my duty in a timely fashion, but back in 1950, there is no whining or complaining about daily responsibilities.
I can read all I want to read—indeed, it is encouraged and expected of me—so long as I take care of the daily deeds assigned to me.
Each of us kids has a list of responsibilities. Mine includes clearing the dining table after meals, disposing of trash, making up my bunk bed, mowing the lawn and so on.
The chores are part of life, but so are other things. It is also my responsibility to read books and comics, play in the yard with local buddies, engage in all sorts of indoor games when it rains…
But there is always that moment of shock whenever anyone interrupts my reading. After all, to me, reading is like a vacation trip or an exploration adventure. As soon as a chapter begins, I am inexorably caught up inside another world, another time. I am a captive of the author and the artist. I am suddenly not the Jim of Eastwood Avenue, but the Jim of wherever the book takes me.
I sneak back to the book that has fallen to the floor. I search for the page that took me to Smiling Pool, where Jerry Muskrat and his pals live and thrive and go adventuring.
Thornton W. Burgess’ book continues revealing things about Reddy Fox I could not have imagined, “Only when he forgets and grins a little too broadly, so that he shows all his long teeth, does his face lose its pleasant look.”
Uh-oh, Reddy Fox may not always be nice and polite. Watch out, Jerry Muskrat!
Seven decades after Jerry and Reddy disappear, I find them again this morning. There, on a lower shelf of dusty books in my writing room…there is the book itself, still awaiting my touch, still sporting my fingerprints, “Jerry Muskrat at Home.” The book’s dust jacket front panel is marked with my penciled name.
Just inside the book, on the first blank page, is this hand-inked inscription, “Presented to James Reed 1950 for studying Sunday School lessons well. Mrs. Mills, Forest Lake Baptist Church.”
The jacket is tattered but bright, some pages are held together by cellophane tape, but the stories within are still there. The stories of all the critters that Burgess invented during a career that boasted 15,000 tales.
Hmm. Thornton W. Burgess was prolific! I wonder if he was one of my influencers?
Here I am all this much further along in my terrestrial journey, having written more than 2,000 stories. I’ll never catch up with TWB. But to this day I continue to weave my true tales, because they never end.
And I continue to this day to be annoyed and jarred whenever anyone anywhere interferes with my literary immersions, my fabulous journeys to anyplace but Here
© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast