Catch Jim’s podcast on youtube: https://youtu.be/NAUAVQICKUE
or read the transcript below:
Life, actually…
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A CHIP OFF THE OLD CROCK
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I’m standing at the kitchen sink munching a freshly-washed carrot.
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Directly before me at eye level is an old thick-glassed milk bottle someone tossed a century-ago. Now it is retrieved, cleansed, shining at me. It is unchipped.
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Some of the wonderful old dishes and cups around here are chipped or cracked. They invite inspection and meditation.
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Each chip reveals something about itself if I will only do the research.
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A countertop blue and white patterned plate complete with quarter-inch notch belonged to my mother. I cannot discard it because it is part of family history. My family breakfasted, snacked, lunched, dined a thousand times on its surface.
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Back to childhood, where I stand before the primal kitchen sink some carefully-counted decades ago. Next to me Sister Barbara accepts a plate I just cleared from the dinner table, scrubs it, rinses off the suds, hands it over to Brother Ronny. Ronny dries and stacks it, preparing for the next dripping dish.
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We kids clear the dinnerware, wash and dry it, later put everything in its assigned place. It’s what we do after Dad has spent the day earning enough income to afford groceries, after Mother has prepared a very special meal of corn on the cob, cornbread, carrot sticks and other nibbles, and the best meat loaf ever consumed thus far in my brief life.
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If I accidentally chip a plate, Mother groans in pain, but nothing more is said. The plate is now a family member complete with boo-boo. No family member would be discarded because of such an imperfection, so the plate resumes its place until the next meal.
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Should a dish fall apart, its shards will be used later as part of garden decorations or pieced together to become an outdoor plant container. The family remains intact even after transfiguration.
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Many years later, as in Right Now, I look around.
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This is a chip day.
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Chip day is when I count and sort and examine chips and cracks. Each is a memory, each a lesson, each a representation of something that must be noted, must be noticed, must be notated.
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These chips remind me of special times when all the world around me felt exciting and secure and hopeful. Each flaw brings out the beauty of an object previously taken for granted.
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I find myself through the years feeling the urgency of life, the urgent need to notice, notice, notice, the compulsion to respect and draw meaning and wisdom from the flaws of a world I cannot control.
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As a child drinking hot chocolate from a chipped cup, I gaze into the fluid, amazed by its swirl, its remaining ring, its heft in my small hands. I rub my finger over the chip, memorizing the feeling. I examine the imprint on the skin after pressing the crack. I want this and every good moment to last forever.
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And at last, as a fully grown and mellow-aged adult, I feel so grateful that all the happenings in my life can be called forth at will, to be examined and cherished as beautiful cracks in an amazing firmament
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Jim Reed © 2021 A.D.
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Weekly Podcast: REDCLAYDIARY