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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