Tag Archives: wisdom

THE HEAVENS DECLARE THEMSELVES

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Life, actually…
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THE HEAVENS DECLARE THEMSELVES
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When young, I used to lie nights on the roof of my parents’ home and listen to the stars.
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You can hear stars, you know. It just takes some patience.
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All you need in order to listen to the stars late at night on a roof is a ladder, a quilt or blanket, a notepad, a pencil, maybe some binoculars or a small telescope, perhaps a penlight, possibly some long sleeves and pants to deter the biting and stinging critters.
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If you can’t find all these objects, you will discover that you don’t need them at all.
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All you have to do is find a way to the roof and hope against hope that ambient human-made lights won’t occlude your view.
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Just lie flat on your back face-up, cradle your head in your hands, and spread yourself open to the immediately viewable universe.
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Don’t expect to be overwhelmed at first. It takes a couple of dozen minutes for your eyes to adjust to the night.
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Then, hold on to the sky and traverse the heavens with ears and eyes and all operating senses.
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There will be color. You will see every fine shade of color you can imagine, colors you never knew were there all along.
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If you lie still long enough, you’ll see meteors—tiny instant streaks of literal stardust that etch the view. Now and then a lone and steady aircraft will arc from horizon to horizon. On really lucky nights, you may glimpse an earthling-crafted satellite scurrying above to the nearest available rabbit hole.
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During special times, you can spot a comet floating solid against the turning sky.
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Sometimes the Moon grins at you, its mystic reflection of the Sun often so bright you can’t see the surrounding sister suns. Once the Moon has gone away, on another night, the points of light will reappear, even though they never went away at all.
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If you’re fortunate, an hour or two of this ancient practice of staring up will set everything in life in proportion, make daily annoyances seem petty and time-consuming, make you humble and grateful all at once—humbled by the incredible expansiveness of it all, grateful that you bothered to stare somewhere besides at the consistently pervasive abuse of the spirit caused by activities of daily living on the small planet.
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Once your eyes begin accepting the handiwork of the heavens, you’ll begin to hear the stars. They will speak to you, tell you stories, impart their philosophies and ideas, cause you to grin ear to ear, make you shed a tear in wonder…and maybe, if you are among the fortunate few who are not afraid of words, you will want to start taking dictation, becoming the scribe of the night, passing forward your wonder and wizened knowledge.
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Maybe you will write down something so ancient and perfect that some reader somewhere will be inspired to sneak outside on a clear evening and play hooky to life…
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On a roof under the dome
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© Jim Reed 2023 A.D.
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Once Upon a Time, Long Before You and Me

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Listen to Jim:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/onceuponatimelongbeforeyouandme.mp3

or read on…

Saturday, October 12, 2013 A.D.

Once upon a time, long before you and me, my mother was born.

Yesterday would have been her 100th birthday.

“WOULD have been her 100th birthday” doesn’t sound exactly right. Actually, it WAS her 100th birthday, she just couldn’t be here to celebrate in person. Or rather, I couldn’t be where she is to celebrate. There are cosmic barriers to such things, you know.

Tomorrow, I will travel to Cuba, Alabama, to visit my mother’s baby sister, Aunt Margaret McGee Hardin. The occasion, husband Uncle Lamar’s 90th birthday, is as good an excuse as any…an excuse to enter the heart of the heart of the Alabama countryside and check up on the Theory of Relativity—that theory being, “In the long run, after all is lived and almost done, it’s Family that matters most, in both memory and reality.” No use trying to escape this theory, because olde times from childhood will not be forgotten, will continue to make themselves  known, will persistently rise up and remind you of your evolution from child of the womb to child of the universe to child of the unknown After Here.

On the way to Aunt Margaret’s home, Liz and I will pick up sister Barbara Reed Partrich at our mother’s home on Old Eastwood Avenue in Tuscaloosa. Barbara has traveled from Columbia, South Carolina, to attend Uncle Lamar’s party.

On the way back from Cuba, maybe the three of us will visit Mom’s burial site to wish her a happy birthday, and stand at the nearby graves of our father and sister Rosi.

We will chat and laugh and reminisce and wipe away an occasional tear, and the lively conversation will include all six of us, since we know in our hearts exactly what Rosi and Mom and Dad would say if we could only hear them.

It will be a nice visit.

And maybe—just maybe—once upon a time in the near future, someone Liz and Barbara and I have left behind will do the same with us, be we coffin-bound or ash-scattered. We’ll be Somewhere Else, but the reunion will be fun anyhow.

At least, maybe the remaining celebrants will get a chuckle out of my epitaph, which will read, NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD IN MIND

 

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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Under the dome of Birmingham: Stalking the elusive mom and pop breakfast places

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Listen to Jim:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/underthebirminghamdome.mp3

or read on…

The man of a certain age sits alone in the diner, his girth mastering most of the booth space.

He eats his breakfast as if he’s never eaten before, smacking and stuffing and sopping and glugging, like he’s not had a meal for days, though it’s evident that he’s been frequently well-fed and well-groomed. He leans into the food and stuffs away, his blow-dried sprayed whitening hair and monogrammed track pullover shirt quivering in the morning fluorescent light.

He is his own world for a few minutes in the crowded eatery.

Across the room, a mustachioed baseball-capped good ol’ boy with hand in napkinned lap eats mannerly and methodically, gazing all the while into the indiscernable space before him, ignoring the blaring TV set hanging from the ceiling.

Worldly waitresses, ears slanted from cached pencils, skillfully walk the tightrope assigned to their lot—the tightrope walk between appearing simultaneously aloof and chummy, careful to balance the roles of Mom and Flirt and Nurturer and Businesswoman while keeping all these morning shovelers of food happy and distant.

Four elderly men at Table 4 grunt and chat and laugh and tease as they relate oft-repeated stories about how the world is going to hell and how the young people these days…

They are having the best time they’ll have all day, for a smattering of minutes avoiding all responsibility and duty and honey-do tasks which will face them down later in the morning, no matter what.

One four-year-old sits with his grandmother and diligently stabs into waffles and syrup and butter with zeal usually assigned to a nervous dog digging for its favorite bone. In just a few years, he, too, will be trying to find the perfect breakfast place that replicates this perfect childhood experience he’s having right now.

He, like all of us in the diner, is imprinted with the combination of taste, texture, fragrance, feel of what it’s like to be in a safe, familiar, non-threatening place, being cared for by kindly strangers whose only goal is to feed you well and stay out of your way while you soak up all that nurturing atmosphere, the nurturing atmosphere you take with you to start the day right, even if later on, some grumbly non-breakfasted bastard wonders why you’re in a better mood than he is, and tries to take it all away from you

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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I’ll never forget the day I read a book

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Listen to Jim:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/illneverforgetthedayireadabook.mp3

 or read on…

So…what is the first book you ever read?

What is the first book I ever read?

Allow me to crank up the Time Machine and get back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when books slowly insinuated themselves into my life.

First thing I do is SEE a book. It’s over there, just within reach of my chubby little uncoordinated fingers. I can roll just a quarter-roll in my crib—that’s all it takes to see this unfocused blur of colors and shapes on the cover. All I know how to do is experience the book, not knowing that it can be read and manipulated. So, I do what I know how to do: lick the cover and gnaw at the corners. It tastes different than those mashed-up things they are feeding me. It would be even tastier if I could bite off a piece and swallow it, but that comes later.

So, first I SEE a book. Then I TASTE it. Then I masticate a bit. Then, I lose concentration and fixate on a wiggly toy that is hanging above me. I’ll get back to the book later.

Next thing I know, I’m snuggled up to my mother’s chest, experiencing the words she is reading to me as they vibrate the side of my face. I can HEAR her voice with one ear. I can FEEL her voice with the other. And then I note that she is gently turning the pages, causing the colorful shapes and strange markings to shift each time. I can hear her inflections of warmth, suspense, happiness, as the pages drift by.

Before I know it, I’m sitting up in my own wobbly fashion and turning the pages—not necessarily one at a time, not necessarily in any order. But I am doing the book the way I know how to do it. And, now and then, I even taste it again. I’ve been known to rub a crayon onto the paper to add color and design.

Time flies and now I’m reciting a book to my mother and sister, pretending that I’m reading it as the pages pass, but actually I still don’t know how to read, I’m just feeding back what I’ve heard them read aloud so many times. They play along with the ruse.

Now, at last, I am picking out a word or two in preparation for enrolling in the first grade. I’m excited about the prospect of actually making my way through the words with some degree of understanding. And, amazingly, after a while I start to read big-lettered words on my own.

What is the first book I can read without assistance? Hard to tell, since the books at school are not the same books we have at home. I’m reading some in both places. But in class, I get to read a Dick and Jane and Sally story all the way through! When I become an author many years later, I am jealous of those who wrote this reader. Wouldn’t you like to be the writer whose works can be recited by heart by millions of school kids? “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run!”

In middle age, I discover the song that comedian Jimmy Durante co-wrote and performed with gusto:

 There’s one day that I recall, though it was years ago.

All my life I will remember it, I know.

I’ll never forget the day a read a book.

It was contagious, seventy pages.

There were pictures here and there,

So it wasn’t hard to bear,

The day I read a book.

It’s a shame I don’t recall the name of the book.

It wasn’t a history. I know because it had no plot.

It wasn’t a mystery, because nobody there got shot.

The day I read a book? I can’t remember when,

But one o’ these days, I’m gonna do it again.

(Listen to Jimmy sing it, at the end of this column.)

Just yesterday, a pleasant family enters the shop, looking around and remarking upon the variety of things to read. One young girl is just tagging along, so naturally she’s the one I try to engage in conversation: “What do you like to read?” I ask, hoping to introduce some titles to her. She performs a sly smile and doesn’t answer because, like so many other children I meet these days, she knows her avid parents will answer for her. “Oh, she doesn’t read,” her father says. I know what he’s saying, but I play dumb just to see what kind of response I’ll get: “You mean she doesn’t know how to read?” I ask sympathetically. She grins even more deeply, waiting for her parent’s punchline. “No she just doesn’t like to read.”

I get it now. This lass has found a way to rebel against her parents, assert her own identity, appear cool to other kids. Normally, I get to talk up a book enough to inspire someone like her to try it, but I know there’s no way this can happen when hovering but well-meaning parents are there to puppet-master her conversation.

So, I say what I always say whenever the situation calls for it: “Oh, too bad. Mark Twain once said that a person who does not read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”

This is aimed at no-one in particular. The girl gets the joke but continues to play dumb. The parents remain perplexed.

What will no doubt happen—I’ve see it often—is she will discover a spicy novel proffered by a friend and, in secret, read it voraciously, becoming hooked on reading despite herself. She will, in the tradition of all kids, hide this novel and this fact from her parents as long as she possibly can.

The cycle goes on.

And maybe one day she’ll hear an old Jimmy Durante song and get excited all over again

Here’s Jimmy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLOR8gKwyoo 

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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Singing in the bathtub with Billy Eckstine and John Lee Hooker

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http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/thewannabebillyeckstine.mp3

or read on…

The Wanna-Be Billy Eckstine Bass-Baritone Life Plan Caper

I’m a barely-teenage superstar belting out my acapella rendition of “That Old Black Magic” in the privacy of the family bathtub, and my audience of none thinks it’s the best thing ever heard on planet earth.

That old black magic has me in its spell.

That old black magic that you weave so well.

Those icy fingers up and down my spine.

The same old witch-craft when your eyes meet mine.

The same old tingle that I feel inside

And then that elevator starts its ride *

The bathtub is private tonight because I have the house to myself for a while—a rarity because two parents and five kids usually live here.

This is back in the early 1950′s in Tuscaloosa, when pre-rock ‘n’ roll singers who make it to the top of their profession know how to enunciate and carry a tune and actually SELL lyrics to the listener. Once you hear the most dynamic of these performers, you are hooked for life.

Anyhow, I’m singing away in the bathtub, hoping against all hope that someday I’ll have a great voice that can belt out “That Old Black Magic” to beat the band, a voice that will make me the most popular kid on the block.

Among the best of the best of all pop singers is Billy Eckstine, whose powerful bass-baritone voice and sense of jazz-disciplined improvisation make him an icon alongside the great male vocalists of the day—Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Nat “King” Cole, Mel Torme, Bobby Troup, Tony Bennett, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Big Joe Williams, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., Steve Lawrence, John Lee Hooker, Fred Astaire. These guys are wonderful storytellers and back in these times they all get to be heard on local radio stations. This is long before music appreciation becomes segmented and self-limiting, long before a true Sinatra fan isn’t allowed to appreciate Hooker, long before it is unfashionable to pair Lawrence with Williams, or Satchmo with Mario Lanza.

In my family household, a great singer is a great singer, regardless of genre or age or race or style…so we listen to Hank Williams and George Beverly Shea and Dean Martin and Leonard Warren and Homer and Jethro equally, because we know each has a talent that must be embraced and appreciated.

That’s why I’m anxious to be home alone now and then so I can bellow out songs that bounce off the tiles and echo my temporarily enriched tones. Today, I’m emulating Billy Eckstine, whose incredible range and clarity make me feel I could make any woman within the sound of my voice swoon.

Funny thing about my particular generation is that we not only love our own music, but we love our parents’ and grandparents’ music as well. Our recordings span half a century—waltzes and bebop and scat and honky tonk and opera and polka and Cajun and country and gospel and schmaltz and jazz and blues and satire all combine according to the mood of the moment.

Later, when I become a disc jockey, I get to play all these forms of music, perhaps the last time any disc jockey is accorded this honor. As soon as the mid-1960′s approach, radio stations begin segmenting, specializing, becoming frozen in playlists. But for a while, I get to ply my trade in several worlds:

At a public radio station, I play classical and opera and ballet, along with show tunes, jazz, folk and international sounds from various exotic cultures. At commercial radio stations, I play “mood” music, rock ‘n’ roll, pop, comedy tunes, country gospel, ol’ time religion, barber shop quartets, upper-crust sacred works—you name it, I am exposed to it. Plus, I get to expose my audience to this wondrous variety of talent.

Nowadays, in the nervous present, I find it difficult to explain my taste in music. Hip hop fans know nothing about bluegrass, punk rockers don’t know who Howlin’ Wolf is, opera enthusiasts look at me funny when I mention that John Denver made recordings with Pavarotti. And heaven forfend if I suggest that Dennis Day also sang with Spike Jones.

So, the evergreen memory I hold close is one of pretending that I, like Billy Eckstine and his generation, might actually, for a coupla seconds at a time, sound great.

This love of understandable lyrics carries me into the future and influences what I later do for pleasure. After all that practice emulating male superstar singers and male superstar actors (Richard Burton, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Dick Martin), I grow up knowing how to make clear what I am saying, how to express the meaning behind the words. It serves me in good stead when, now and again, I get to perform in public, teach, act, communicate the love of great books. I have Billy Eckstine and all his buddies to blame.

So, many moons after the Tuscaloosa bathtub performance days, I still sing at the top of my lungs in the shower—but only when no-one is around. After all, the worst thing anyone could tell me is that I may sound more like Don Knotts than Eckstine.

Darling down and down I go,

‘Round and ’round I go,

In a spin, loving the spin I’m in

Under that old black magic called love! *

Denial of unpleasant truths is something I’ve honed to a fine art. It keeps me going forward, keeps me from facing unwanted realities, keeps me performing for my admiring shower stall audience of none

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

( Listen to the man himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SATmftj-Qbc )

(The above lyrics are verbatim from the original sheet music by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. Lyrics found elsewhere on the internet are inaccurate–and mostly transcribed phonetically.)

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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Pipe Dreams of the Bookladen Orphanage

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or read on, dear reader…

An energetic, robust customer bounds through the door of Reed Books. He is lugging a large box filled to the brim with pipes. “Here are some more things from the house,” he pronounces. Then, he hands the load over to me and rushes out the door while I search for a place to situate the box.

“Here’s the last of our stuff,” he announces, as he returns and unloads two large plastic containers of old books. He needs to retrieve the containers in order to haul future troves.

It’s like Christmas every day at the shop. Folks bring large trash bags of paperbacks, rickety wooden boxes filled with attic leftovers, linen-wrapped fragiles from another century, suitcases of old documents and memorabilia, purses packed with formerly-loved treasures, books upon books.

It’s a mistake to dismiss even the worst-looking arrival without first peering within, combing for the kinds of saleable, collectible items that keep the store running. There’s almost always something unique hidden among the gewgaws and doodads and thingamajigs and artifacts and disposables that are presented to me. Even the worst-looking or worthless-seeming items have stories to tell. I feel like a fortune teller or seer, as I explain the source or meaning of each societal leftover.

So, why do I accept today’s gift of a large box filled with smoking pipes? After all, this is a bookstore. Why pipes?

Well, at one time in this bookie world, pipes and tobacco and humidors and clippers and scrapers and cleaners and flexible stems and ashtrays and cigar boxes and humidifiers and smoking jackets were part of the setting in which books were read, collected, enjoyed, catalogued, referenced, displayed, meditated upon.

Today, lots of other accumulatables decorate rooms where books are cherished, replacing the now politically-incorrect smoking paraphernalia. Books are not read in a vacuum; they are enjoyed while the reader surrounds them with a favorite reading chair, a blankie, a snack, a cherished pet, photographs of family and friends, a cuppa java, a music reproduction device lurking nearby or stuck into ear.

The surroundings are part of the literary experience—unless you tend to read while suspended in darkest, starless space.

As I walk the aisles of century-laden books, my memory of each title encompasses everything that was going on while I was reading…when I touch a copy of ANTIC HAY by Aldous Huxley, I can almost smell the unmown grass surrounding me on the lawn of my childhood home as I once lay a-blanket, reading in the shade. I can feel my too-tight tennis shoes making editorial comments about the characters in the book whose shoes always fit correctly, I can sense the impending visit from a neighborhood playmate, I can conscript a bit of clover to use as bookmark, I can see the gaunt face of Huxley on the back cover, I can retrieve this visceral memory years later when I actually meet him at a lecture.

Each book in the big world has equal status in my tiny world. Each is conceived, edited, submitted, argued over, politicked, rewritten, slicked up, dumbed down, smartened up, designed, proofed, printed, even re-printed. Each book is purchased or shop-lifted, partially read or not read at all, re-gifted, torn apart for an art project, ignored in a corner for ages, chewed by the dog, passed on to another reader, thrift-stored or ebayed or donated, treasured in the family archives, burned at the stake.

Each book in the shop is my little orphan, awaiting adoption, nose pressed to the show window, hoping for a kindly reader to take it home where awaits an easy chair, a bookcase, a coffee table, a bit of reading light, nurturing, understanding, tolerance, respect.

Nearby, out of reverence for readers of the past, rest pipe rack, ashtray, wooden matches, and the old familiar fragrance of tobaccos past and pulp papers survived and, just out of camera range, the next reader, rubbing hands together gleefully in anticipation of the joys and sorrows and provocative ideas hiding between covers that shield the pages till just the right moment

(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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CAN’T STOP MY BRAIN flashthoughts #835

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OR READ ON… 

Things happen when you’re sitting all alone in the airport cellphone parking lot in your transportable solitary cell, waiting for the call to do a drive-by at the baggage area to give your wife a ride home.

Yes, things happen when your brain won’t be idle,

even though you’re on idle and your car is idling.

Like,

1.  When a fugitive, would you rather be at large or on the loose ?

2.  Does the poor grammar of the song Live and Let Die bother anyone but me? “…but in this everchanging world in which we live in…”

3.  Did you run your car off the road when the local public radio station interviewer and interviewee simultaneously and repeatedly pronounced Pythias as PIE-thee-us?

4.  Do you love the passionate poetry of this passage from a Howlin’ Wolf song, “…this bad love she got…makes me laugh and cry…makes me really know…I’m too young to die…” ?

5.  Why do I obsess over the fact that Gene Autry mispronounces Santa’s reindeer’s name as Donner ? It’s Donder, I tell you, Donder. See http://donder.com/  (I learned it at the annual Donder party.)

6.  Do you find it inexplicable that the more Ahmad Jamal or Dimitri Shostakovich or Miles Davis repeat a musical phrase or note imterminably, the more it grows on you and becomes a powerful statement?

7.  Isn’t it remarkable how drummer Joe Morello’s burst of laughter and relief at the end of Dave Brubeck’s tune Unsquare Dance makes the piece just about perfect? You have to turn the volume up real high to hear it.

8.  Notice that if you think real hard about it, there are at least eight (maybe more) museums within quick walking distance of Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories? Tourists already know this. Here they are: Sports Hall of Fame/Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Radio Museum (at the Alabama Power Company building), Birmingham History Museum, McWane Center exhibits, Ullman Museum, Reynolds Library Medical Museum, Civil Rights Institute/Museum, Museum of Fond Memories... I’ll let you fill in the rest.

9.  As Shel Silverstein said, “This town grows old around me…” but as it grows, it only gets better and better. Brigitte Bardot commented, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”

As the center of the Universe, Birmingham is ripening and ready to burst into a new future. As the bookstore at the center of the center of the Universe, Reed Books, too, becomes more beautiful.

Those are my fragmentary momentary thoughts. Just can’t stop my brain…