Happy Birthday to Me | redclaydiary.com

Listen to Jim: http://www.jimreedbooks.com/mp3/happyBirthdaytoMe.mp3 or read on…

So, as of this coming Tuesday, I’ll have celebrated scores and scores of birthdays in my lifetime. My evergreen memories grow fresher, and my sense of humor strengthens. What can you do but laugh?

Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories is my sanctuary, a place I can place on display and sell all things wonderful and precious. This is a foster home for memories, and I can’t wait till you drop by.

I found this small memory tucked away, and I’d like to share it with you and my brother, Ronny. He and I were kid pals and everything we did is worthy of remembrance:

TUSCALOOSA DREAMS

Long ago and far away, the Tiny Town of T lay peaceful beneath starry night skies and pale-glaring day skies. Under T Town lay red clay soil that sludged dark when heavy rains came and swirled dusty during long dry stretches of languid time.

Sometimes the red dust red clay soil was overlain with curvaceous green kudzu and Johnson grass and golden toned long-stemmed grass. Sometimes the soil hid itself under gentle crisp snow and listless dew and manicured lawn seed. At other times the soil brazenly showed itself and didn’t care what you thought about it.

In that tiny T Town in Alabama came small boys in 1941 and 1944, two young and fidgeting fledglings who were known as brothers of summer, barefoot band-aided guests of the next best adventure.

Those brothers of summer did those things that bonded boys do under bleached sun skies and over red-ant mounds. They played and imagined and guessed at what nature was all about, they prayed sweaty-palmed prayers by rote, hoping to make their dreams come true by sheer willpower and through the fierce force of squinting and straining and crossed-finger hoping and ritualizing.

Some dreams came true, but only in their thoughts, other dreams failed as dreams but succeeded as grownup party-spoiling reality, and sometimes the bonded brothers did not know the difference between harsh dreams and sweet reality.

They only knew that if they squinted and wished hard enough, things would be ok and all right and super Kosher, though they had no idea what Kosher really meant, except that it possibly had to do with all-rightness.

Those boys did not soon die, since they had many more decades to live and dream, to live and forget their dreams, to live even long enough to once more recall those dreams, to retrieve those dreams and make them part of their nowadays reality.

Now the T Town boys of dreams can comfortably walk arm in arm shoulder to shoulder elbow to elbow through the remaining years of their lives, enjoying their dreamlike realities, fessing up to their reality-laced dreams, and not giving one whit anymore whether where they are at any particular moment is dream or reality

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Guess the right thing to do on Tuesday is call my brothers and sisters and wish them Happy Birthday to Me, just for old time’s sake.