Listen to Jim: http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/somewhereintime.mp3
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I was raised in an asbestos-shingled two-bedroom bungalow at 26 Eastwood Avenue in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
If the address doesn’t have a familiar ring to it, maybe this will help: The house is two blocks from the intersection of 15th Street East and MacFarland Boulevard. If that doesn’t have a ring to it, maybe this will help: The intersection was hit by tornadoes just one year ago, and virtually everything in sight was damaged or wiped out.
Except for the little asbesto-shingled two-bedroom home on Eastwood Avenue.
I don’t know why our home was spared. Brother-in-law Larry Partrich has repaired the damage and still stays there when he’s in town. Several other homes on the same street are still standing. Nobody died. And nobody knows why.
Being brought up in Tuscaloosa was a wonderful experience, but one thing we lived with in T-town was the reality of storms—primarily tornadoes. Each year of my life we’d have storms and storm warnings. We knew lots of people whose property was slammed, whose lives were altered by these impartial acts of Nature. It was something we just took for granted.
We knew that, should we live long enough, we, too, would be hit by nature, humbled by its terrible beauty. And, judging from the behavior of everybody we knew and knew about, we also knew that, if devastated, those of us who survived would come back and just keep on keeping on.
People have done this since time began.
If you live at the edge of a volcano, you just arise each day, thankful that this wasn’t the day it erupted. If you live on a faultline, you know that time is merely borrowed and that some day an earthquake will rattle your brains. If you reside in a dry forest you are happy that today isn’t runaway-inferno day.
If you live on Planet Earth, you remain thankful that today is not the day a meteor hits you, a solar flare stir-fries you, the finger of an unknown god squashes you, a bolt of lightning decides you are a good conductor, Fate decrees you expendable…
After the storms of last year, I drove through the remains of that nearby Tuscaloosa neighborhood where I played, worked, dated, dared, dreamed, acted foolishly and wisely, and otherwise lived the first 27 years of my life. I was horrified. But I was grateful, too…grateful for all the years I’d spent writing about those early years, describing the streets and inhabitants, waxing nostalgic about my times there, carefully memorizing each location I ever visited.
Storms can erase the mere physical presence of a town, but they can’t touch or alter my fond memories, they can’t change the fact that the real town is still here, in memory unshakeable. If I ever see you in Tuscaloosa, I’ll be glad to tour you through the actual town, the town that’s in my heart
(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed