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Life, actually…

HOLISTIC EAR-FLAP SMOKER SKIPS MLK/REL LAUNDRY DAY

It’s not just any Monday morning. It’s a dozen years ago, when I wrote this note in the Red Clay Diary:

I pull up to the laundry next door to Golden Temple, drop off my week’s worth of wash/dry/fold, not very surprised that the laundry is open despite the fact it’s a national holiday. The laundry lady sighs when I say, “I see y’all are open on Doctor King’s birthday.” Her eyebrow movements tell me a lot.

A scruffy chain-smoking guy in ear-flap hat pulls at the locked Golden Temple door, carefully reads the sign, takes another drag, then saunters on down the street, just barely missing a chance to pick up some holistic medical advice…about how to quit smoking? Maybe?

Eleventh Avenue South is almost barren.

A Christmas tree peeks over the back gate of the pickup truck in front of me, waving a forlorn good-bye to the season.

At the shop, computer tech Daniel reminds me that this is also Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Sorry I forgot, Bob.

I unpack my bag of show-and-tell goodies from yesterday’s speech at the Alabaster public library, receive an e-mail thank-you from one of the attendees, and wonder what it is I said that made a difference in her day.

I pack for shipment a leatherbound limited edition of Ayn Rand’s THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, prepare rough drafts of the weekly message I’ll be sending out to fans and subscribers, and send a note to Joey Kennedy, thanking him for granting me permission to publish one of his stories in a future Birmingham Arts Journal.

I think about the world and all its incredible inconsistencies, small joys, huge terrors, gentle comforts.

I think how nice it would be to have a national holiday devoted to unselfish kindnesses

Jim Reed (c) 2021 A.D.

Listen to Jim: http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/survivingtheredmudsnake.mp3

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Life, actually…

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SURVIVING THE RED MUD SNAKE FILLED STORM CENTER DITCH

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I am sliding down the muddy red-clay slope of The Ditch, and wondering whether I’ll land head-first or rump-first on the bottom. It’s a split-second skid that lasts an hour during the rewinding playbacks of my memory.

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This is back in the late 1940′s of my elementary school childhood, back when things are still clear and mysterious and enormous and simple all at the same time.

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The Ditch is deep and long to a small kid my size, and within it ranges water moccasins, a diversity of insects, swirls of soft plant matter, tadpoles and…Germs. Germs are invisible, but we kids think we can see them, since Mother warns us about them all the time—”Wash your hands, get rid of those germs before supper!” or “Flush the commode and wash those germs away,” or “Don’t pass your cough germs to anybody else, wash up!”

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So, the Ditch we play in is all the more fascinating because of its threats and germs, because of its constant humorous surprises—ever looked real close and long at a frog or a smooth stone or a mudpie? All science and theology and philosophy lie dormant inside them until  you decide to revive and employ them.

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Anyhow, I’m walking home from school in a driving rain, holding onto one telephone pole after another to keep from blowing away in the strongest wind I’ve ever encountered. At the edge of The Ditch, which runs parallel to the retired Army barracks  serving as Northington School in Tuscaloosa, I squint down to see how far the water has risen, and that’s when I slip and fall—and eventually land.

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The bottom of The Ditch blocks some of the wind and rain, so I’m kind of safe, even with the thought of those snakes and critters creeping about. And by now I don’t even remember whether I’ve landed on bottom or cranium. Now it’s all about the mud and trying to decide whether to stay and slosh around or head home and get clean and dry.

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At last, it seems more prudent to get the heck out of The Ditch and traverse the Night on Bald Mountain landscape to security. When you’re this age, you can always find a way to climb a slippery bank. You’re just full of energy and adrenalin and vim, and you don’t have enough experience to know that sometimes you can’t make it out of a tough situation alone. You just do it.

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Just recently, I stand where The Ditch used to be, thinking about another storm that hit dead center at this very spot, a storm that destroyed most of the neighborhood I used to play in, a storm that was not as forgiving as the one I survived way back then.  I realize that coins flip, fate decides what’s what, some kids get to live another half century or so after a crisis…and some don’t.

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Thanks to this particular flip of the coin, I live to tell you the tale of one kid whose love of getting through the day drove unabated through the years, pretty much the way most kids most everywhere get through the years…by enjoying the mud and chaos, but by also appreciating the love of an anti-germ Mom, a nice hot bath, dry clothes, and dreams about what adventure might take place the next day, if you’re lucky

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(c) 2021 A.D. by Jim Reed

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jim@jimreedbooks.com

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I run a Christmas shop, a Christmas museum, a Christmas antique emporium.

Why Christmas?

Well, you’d know the answer to that—if you’d known my Mother.

To Mother, every day was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day combined. All her life, she was able to see through the pain and confusion of life, through to the sweetness that she felt from the time she was born till her own Mother died fifteen years later. She never left childhood alone on the back step, but took it with her and carried her understanding of children and their pure and innocent outlook on life, all the way to another existence, 83 years after her birth.

Every day was Christmas at our house. Each day, we paid careful attention to weeds and frogs and paint chips and stuffed toys and sunbeams and tears and relatives and concrete sidewalks and Pepsi Colas and fresh cornbread. Under Mother’s tutelage, we kids learned to note things, notice things, note people, notice people.

Taking her example, we learned to find something fine in just about everything, everybody, every Thing, every Body. Each day, we woke up to a Christmas gift of life, neatly wrapped, anxiously waiting to be unwrapped.

That being said, maybe the rest of this story will make more sense to you.

Whenever I use the gift of noticing people, I learn something new.

While she was still alive and active, Mother spent some time each day hiding messages she prepared for her kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and her extended family of kids. She didn’t give us these messages directly, since her experience with human nature warned her that we would probably ignore them because of our youth and immaturity.

So, Mother sent messages in bottles for us to find accidentally through the years, each time just as we were almost grown-up enough to recognize and appreciate them.

Christmas was Mother’s favorite season, so she made sure that more secret messages were generated at that time. She wanted us to remember how much fun, how much love, swirled about our family so that we would remember to pass this joy along to our own families and extended families.

Mother died in 1997, and life went on without her, as life does. We kids and grandkids and great-grandkids went our way and did our own lives the way we thought we had designed them. At times, we acted as if we had never had a mother, as if we had invented ourselves, as if we were self-made.

But we could never fool ourselves for long.

Without Mother’s nurturing and sacrifices, without her humor and overwhelming bluntness, we could not have been formed.

One day, my sister Barbara gave me a bunch of stuff she had salvaged from Mother’s old house in Tuscaloosa. In the pile was an unopened box that felt hefty enough not to be empty. When I had time a few days later, I took that box up and peered at it, reading the words thereon:

“MUSICAL ROCKING SANTA. Sure to delight collectors of all ages, this 8 inch high rocking Santa captures the spirit of Christmas past with exquisite handfinished detail.”

The box was colorful and depicted a kindly snoozing Santa.

The imprinting continued, “It features a genuine Sankyo wind-up musical movement from Japan. Handcrafted and handpainted in China by people who care. This copyrighted design is made under an exclusive licensing agreement with the copyright holder. (C) 1995 II INC.”

This box looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite get it. If it was manufactured in 1995, it couldn’t have been one of my childhood toys.

Hmm…

I carefully opened the box, making sure not to damage anything, since I might find that it belonged to somebody else in the family.

Inside, a toy any Christmas Lover would covet:

A statue of Santa Claus—a dozing Santa Claus. I can still see the toy on my shelf at home, today: Santa’s dozing, full-capped and furred, in a green highbacked rocking chair with a yellow kitten peeping over his right shoulder, a flop-eared dog in his lap, a December 26 calendar in his drooped left hand and a small toy at his feet. His bathrobe and striped longjohns and tasselled red boots top it all off.

This man is tired and at peace, falling asleep so fast he’s forgotten to remove his spectacles.

When I wind him up, the chair gently rocks back and forth, a melody tinkles its way about the room, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas…”

I loved this toy, and it took me a few days to figure out its history. Recalling that Mother never stored anything she owned without leaving a note about it, I went back to the box, turned it upside down and, sure enough, there was Mother’s message to me, these few years later. I could hear her musical voice saying it aloud,

“This goes back to Jim after I’m gone! I enjoyed this toy! –Mother”

That was my Mother, ok. She never threw anything away, knowing that someone in the far future would find joy in each remaining object, if only it was stored safely enough to be found.

This was her way of giving back to me the joy I had given her when I presented her with the Santa before she died.

Now, ol’ Santa sits on my shelf, waiting to entertain, waiting to make me remember my Christmas Mother, waiting for me to pass him along to the next person who would take a close look at the bottom of the box to see what kind of message I would add to Mother’s

(c) 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Here is a true story I re-tell every Thanksgiving, just

to remind myself and you that everything that really

matters is right before us, all the time. Here ‘tis:

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THANKSGIVING:

THE HAPPIEST SAD DAY OF THE YEAR

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The saddest thing I ever saw: a small, well-dressed elderly woman dining alone at Morrison’s Cafeteria, on Thanksgiving Day.

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Oh there are many other sadnesses you can find if you look hard enough, in this variegated world of ours, but a diner alone on Thanksgiving Day makes you feel really fortunate, guilty, smug, relieved, tearful, grateful…it brings you up short and makes you time-travel to the pockets of joy and cheer you experienced in earlier days…

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Crepe paper. Lots of crepe paper. And construction paper. Bunches of different-colored construction paper. In my childhood home in Tuscaloosa, my Thanksgiving Mother always made sure we creative and restless kids had all the cardboard, scratch paper, partly-used tablets, corrugated surfaces, unused napkins, backs of cancelled checks, rough brown paper from disassembled grocery bags, backs of advertising letters and flyers…anything at all that we could use to make things. Yes, dear 21^st-Century young’uns, we kids back then made things from scraps.

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We could cut up all we wanted, and cut up we did.

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We cut out rough rectangular sheets from stiff black wrapping paper and glued the edges together to make Pilgrim hats. Old belt buckles were tied to our shoelaces—we never could get it straight, whether the Pilgrims were Quakers, or vice versa, or neither. But it always seemed important to put buckles on our shoes and sandals, wear tubular hats and funny white paper collars, and craft weird-looking guns that flared out like trombones at one end. More fun than being a Pilgrim/Quaker was being an Indian—a true blue Native American, replete with bare chest, feathers shed by neighborhood doves, bows made of crooked twigs and kite string, arrows dulled at the tip by rubber stoppers and corks, and loads of Mother’s discarded rouge and powder and lipstick and mashed cranberries smeared here and there on face and body, to make us feel like the Indians we momentarily were.

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Sister Barbara and Mother would find some long autumnal-hued dresses for the occasion, but they were seldom seen outside the kitchen for hours on end, while the eight-course dinner was under construction.

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There was always an accordion-fold crepe paper turkey centerpiece on display, hastily bought on sale at S.H. Kress, just after last year’s Thanksgiving season. It looked nothing like my Aunt Mattie’s turkeys in her West Blocton front yard. And for some reason, we ate cranberry products on that day and that day only. Nobody ever thought about cranberries the other 364 days! And those lucky turkeys were lucky because nobody ever thought of eating them except at Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were home free the rest of the year!

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Now, back into the time machine of just a few years ago.

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It is Thanksgiving Day. My wife and son and granddaughter are all out of the country. Other family and relatives are either dead or gone, or just plain tied up with their own lives in other states, doing things other than having Thanksgiving Dinner with me.

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My brother, Tim, my friends Tim Baer and Don Henderson and I decide that we will have to spend Thanksgiving Dinner together, since each of us is bereft of wife or playmate or relative, this particular holiday this particular year.

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So, we wind up at Morrison’s Cafeteria, eating alone together, going through the line and picking out steamed-particle-board turkey, canned cranberries, thin gravy, boxed mashed potatoes and some bakery goods whose source cannot easily be determined.

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But we laugh at our situation and each other, tell jokes, cut up a bit, and thank our lucky stars that this one Thanksgiving Dinner is surely just a fluke. We’ll be trying that much harder, next year, to not get blind-sided by the best holiday of the year, Thanksgiving being the only holiday you don’t have to give gifts or reciprocate gifts or strain to find the correct gifts.

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Left to right: Tim Reed, Tim Baer, Jim Reed lining up for Thanksgiving.

Don Henderson is behind the camera.

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On Thanksgiving holidays ever since, I make sure I’m with family and friends, and now and then I try to set a place at the table of my mind, for any little old lady or lone friend who might want to join us…for the second saddest thing I’ve ever seen is a happy family lustily enjoying a Thanksgiving feast together and forgetting for a moment about all those lone diners in all the cafeterias of the world who could use a kind glance and a smile

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© 2017 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

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THE ROGERS BOY SAVE MY LIFE

Did I ever stop to thank you guys?

I know you’re all still hanging around, in film and video and literature and memory, but out of the four of you, I only got to express my gratitude to one.

Let me back up.

I’m thinking about the four Rogers Boys in my life: Will Rogers, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers and Fred Rogers.

Will and Roy and Buck chaperoned me through my childhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Fred stuck with me after that, and to this day still nurtures me.

Will Rogers was funny, wise, commonsensical, more like a kindly uncle who saw through pretense and ego and managed to make me laugh at the scary and puzzling and daunting things that life dishes out. He found a way to see something useful and good in just about everybody he met, be they despot or beggar, politico or felon. At my best, I try to keep my head and think about what Will Rogers would have said about my predicaments.

Roy Rogers taught me his code of ethics. Through his movies, comic books, broadcast appearances and personal life, he set standards of behavior. His public persona was upright, he played fair even when others didn’t, he was open and giving of time to anyone who needed a helping hand. His private life was exemplary: his adopted family was diverse—way ahead of his times. Whenever I was in trouble, I’d think about how Roy would have acted.

Buck Rogers fueled my imagination and helped me see beyond the corporeal and gravitational strictures of being alive. He taught me to accept my wildest dreams as part of my reality. He introduced me to a futurist whose head remains in the clouds and whose feet stay firmly planted on the ground—Ray Bradbury. Buck Rogers taught me to let my mind run free, with the simultaneous realization that reality is always there to keep me stable and productive for family and society.

Finally, Fred Rogers walked with me for decades, and still does, reminding me to see the useful and good things about people and the world, all the while noting that things are never perfect. He was my friend no matter what mistakes I made. He was forgiving and instructive at the same time. Latch-key children throughout the world depended on him every afternoon, since he was the only adult in their lives who looked directly at them and talked gently with them, who gave them 30 minutes a day uninterrupted and non-threatening. I discovered him as an adult and recognized the latch-key kid within myself. I wrote to him and he replied, fortifying my observation that it’s ok to be strong and kind at the same moment.

Well, that’s what I think about the Rogers Boys. Go ahead—google them, study them, see what they have to say. Better still, adopt your own set of chaperones, people in your life who are so good and nurturing that you tend to take them for granted and forget to thank them till now.

I’ve been given much good advice in my life, most of which I resisted or ignored. But, luckily, the people I select to guide me in the long run, such as the Rogers Boys, are always there, waiting for me to grow up and finally listen

(c) 2017 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

www.jimreedbooks.com

Listen to Jim:

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THE KEROUAC THELMA MARGARET ROAD-THRILL JOY RIDE

When I was young and knew nothing but what my imagination dreamed up, I thought it would be most amazing if one day I could muster the courage to Hit the Road, Destination Unknown.

Lying abed late at night, the moaning whistles of passing trains would feed my fantasy of hopping a freight and hobo-ing it to the Next Place Thataway.

Books such as Robinson Crusoe and Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus made it seem possible to run away and self-survive, prove my manhood—to whom?—and come back to town a seasoned hero.

Later literature kept up the pressure: I could run wild like Kerouac and Cassady…go pell mell like Thelma and Louise…get to know mysterious people like Steinbeck and Charley, take the blue highways like Least Heat Moon.

And, true to my metaphorical destiny, I did go on the road…but solely in baby steps. To this day, a visit to Pratt City or Columbia, South Carolina or Victor, Idaho or Gardendale are equally fun and adventurous. As soon as I press the pedal, I’m off and running, seeking material for the Museum of Fond Memories, material for my blast/blog/tweet/facebook/books, material to riffle through in old age.

When she was a teen-ager, my daughter Margaret and I occasionally took to the road—off to a reunion or a visit or a flea market, racing along and loving every minute of it. Back then, Margaret, being psychically connected to me, abandoned herself to my goals—those goals being to enjoy the moment and not worry about anything else at all.

First thing Margaret and I did at the start of every journey was stop at a convenience store—any convenience store—and load up on all the junk food we weren’t allowed to eat at home. Crackling cellophane, popping cola tops, outrageous belching and lots of laughter drowned out the rest of the world. We would end each trip happy and satisfied, having tossed care to the winds if only for a few hours. There were no negatives to these adventures, if you don’t count the inevitable indigestion.

It was inexpensive therapy.

To this day, Margaret still has adventures, having been all over the place, from the top of the Tetons, to Paris, to England, to Jackson Hole, to Costa Rica, to Cuba, to Tanzania, to China, to Panama, to the Snake River. I can’t go with her, but I live every moment vicariously, traveling in mind and heart with my long-ago companion. She always reports back to me and we always laugh in memory green.

I still journey throughout the world and to corners of the universe, but I do it the best way I know…each day showing up at the Museum of Fond Memories and passing artifacts on to you and others—artifacts from the past 500 years and the far corners of the planet.

Come in and take a road trip around the shop with me

• youcantellthatithurtsher.mp3

That wasn’t so painful, was it? Seinfeld would be proud.

Let’s do this again sometime

(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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The Last of the Red-Hot Neisghborhood Watchers

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The Queen of Southside Birmingham is dead.

Long live the Queen.

Our 92-year-old neighbor Margaret Selman left us happy. She wanted nothing more than to join her late husband and best friend, Frank, and she died smiling and excitedly talking about the prospect. She left us neighbors happy—happy with good memories of the way she ran the ‘hood for nearly a century.

This is not some kind of soppy obituary designed to paint Margaret as a perfect person, not designed to make you think I was always the best neighbor I could be. I just want you to get a quick thumbnail image of Margaret in your mind.

First of all, her throne was the wrap-around porch of the big two-story 1906 home she and Frank kept immaculate all those years. She held court each evening when the weather was right, and folks came from miles around to sip some sweet tea and share gossip and laughter for a few minutes under Frank’s big ceiling fan.

Any evening you might see a parked police car, indicating some officers were sitting and chatting and catching up on street news. An occasional city council member or merchant or dogwalker or wanderer or priest might stop and smile and listen to Margaret’s very long, very detailed, and very accurate tales. And she remembered each and every person, if not by name, then certainly by physical description.

One other thing: Nobody ever said NO to Margaret and got away with it. She was a powerhouse persuader, and most of us just learned to give in and enjoy the ride. Frank never said NO to her, either. He would give her anything she ever wanted. And he loved every minute of it.

Margaret was a walking genealogy reference and historian—she could recite the names and addresses of each and every family who had lived in each and every house for a two-block radius over a seven-decade period. And she knew where the bodies were buried. She knew who was Catholic, who was Jewish, who was Heathen, who was kind, who was spirited, who was unkind. You could always run a character reference on someone you didn’t know.

And she was a great guardian of the ‘hood. At any hour of the day or night, she and Frank would chase ambulances and fire engines if they stopped nearby, always ready to help stressed-out people, always ready to fill in the details of the incident when you dropped by later.

This was Margaret’s neighborhood, and she felt safe and protected no matter what went on around her, because she remembered how safe and protected she had been as a little girl in the big house in the 1920′s and ’30′s. After all, she resided in the house for all but two of her 92 years and would never consider moving anywhere else.

Just the other afternoon, when Margaret’s daughter Becky walked across the yard to tell me her mom had gone away a few minutes earlier, still smiling, I felt the slam of a large dome dropping over the ‘hood. For a few moments, the dome retained all the laughter and fun we’d had over the  decades, laughing and talking and eating all the wonderful sweets the Selmans kept on hand for guests, all the babies and grandbabies and great-grandbabies Margaret had bounced on her knee, all the time she’d come to our rescue and we to hers. Then, the dome lifted, no longer needed, since all the good times were permanently embedded in my own memories and the memories of everyone who ever spent time with her. Now we can carry her sweet smile and bawdy laughter with us as inspiration for how we will treat our own family and acquaintances.

Margaret and Frank were the models for what good neighbors can be.

And rather than wistfully rue their passing, it’s fitting that I carry their legacy forward and become a model neighbor myself. As difficult as that might be

(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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In memory most fertile, my time machine takes me back to THE STAGE….THE THEATRE…THE COMPANY OF THESPIANS.

I’m way back in time now, when I am  a young teenager who loves nothing better than to be On Stage, acting in a play. Performing gets into my blood early on, in grammar school, when I learn that the only time anybody pays attention to what I do or say is when I am in front of an audience.

Don’t ask me why this is true, I don’t understand it myself. Other shy people have shared similar experiences—being shy, some of them naturally gravitate toward the performing arts.

Anyhow, being an ACTOR is fun. Mainly, because I get to be around ACTRESSES—they pay attention to me while girls at school primarily ignore me.

The fact that I’m an ACTOR instead of an ACTRESS is quite a relief. I’ve learned that wearing a dress or skirt or toga on stage is no fun at all.

For instance, I go down to the high school auditorium to try out for a part in a touring PASSION PLAY—the theatrical troupe needs local extras and I’ve never been in a national production, so I hang around till they cast me as one of Jesus’ disciples. I’m in yet another play!

During first rehearsal, I learn two valuable lessons—first, never do anything to distract the audience. I’m sitting at the Last Supper and Jesus is passing around bread and wine. As the bread nears, I notice that a cup is blocking the way and will probably be knocked over by the distracted actor sitting next to me. I quickly move the cup—just in time—but am also quickly chastised for the unrehearsed movement. Oops! I just upstaged Jesus himself!

The other lesson I learn is that biblical garb is airy—I’m wearing a short gladiator-length tunic and feel about as naked as a newborn. How do women adjust to this kind of potential exposure? Being a “pro,” I pretend it’s not a problem and manage to perform in the play and retain my modesty, but a major life decision is made: I’ll never accept a stage role that requires any garb other than pants. I’m not cut out to dress like modern women or ancient men.

My father is partially relieved, since his generation quietly fears that, by hanging around gay men and loose women in the theatre, I just might “become” one of the former or carouse with one of the latter. I wind up carousing with less-than-loose women a bit, so he replaces his homophobia with loosewomenaphobia. Talk about mixed emotions—he’s relieved I’m not gay, but now he’s worried I’m going to get into trouble with them female types!

Anyhow, I still enjoy the fact that women usually wear dresses and skirts, but I’m glad I’m not required to wear them. After acting, I know how it feels, and I am left with a kind of awe at how self-confident women must be compared to men. Makes me respect them that much more.

Guess I’ll hitch up my pants and see whether Liz would like to carouse

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Outside-in socks, neatly folded underpants

and buttoned-up Book-Em Danno shirts as evidence of character

This evening, I open the first big bag of wash-dry-fold from an unfamiliar neighborhood laundry and wish for the best.

After all, for decades, the Laundry Ladies at the just-closed Flamingo Cleaners have been taking care of us—the Reed family of 17th Street South. Each week, I gather everything dirty-but-washable into these drawstring bags and toss them over the banister to the foyer below. The resultant THUDS are part of the ritual of the morning. Then, I lug the bags to the car and drop them off on the way to work. At the end of the day, there are few things more satisfying than still-warm gently-sorted-and-folded sweet-smelling garments ready to be tucked away in closets and drawers. The most satisfying part of this ritual is the fact that, in all these decades, I haven’t had to wash a single item of clothing myself!

Back in a previous life, the task of sitting for hours in a laundromat usually fell to me, and I always considered it to be an incredible waste of perfectly good time. I recall as a small child watching my mother literally toil over clothes-washing, having to stir  and scrub them by hand in a tub, rinse them, wring them out, hoist the water-heavy garments onto her shoulders to the backyard, where they were one by one tidily smoothed straight and hung out to dry, later to be brought inside, pressed, sorted, folded and put away.

But, as I say, I got out of having to feed quarters into broken machinery many moons ago, and my mother eventually got some machinery that made her life somewhat easier. I just never got her toil out of my mind and hoped my wife would never have to do what she had to do.

Anyhow, the Laundry Ladies always took care of the task, usually with good humor and silent professionalism. And, unlike Mother, they were paid to do so.

But today is the first day I’ve had to use a new wash-dry-fold facility, and I’m hoping for the best.

As I empty the clothes onto the upstairs master bed, I’m pleasantly surprised. And grateful! That’s because I begin to realize, as I put things away, that the new laundry folder has added personality to the process. My socks, always turned inside-out because I wear them that way, have been methodically matched and turned outside-in, because that’s the way socks should be. My BOOK-EM DANNO shirts are not only folded, but they are buttoned up—something I’ve never experienced. Everything is categorized and ready to use.

This might be evidence of someone who truly loves the job of washing-drying-folding, someone who takes pride in the task, someone who gains some degree of satisfaction from having done well what could be considered an uninteresting and repetitive chore.

So, what’s the difference between this service worker and my previous Laundry Ladies?

Not much, on one level—the Laundry Ladies were very proficient, friendly, poorly paid and overworked, but they kept on keeping on, doing what they could do, and doing it dependably well. The mysterious new laundry worker is equally task-driven and polite, but that extra bit of care, that WILLINGNESS TO DO MORE THAN THE JOB REQUIRES, speaks of an earlier generation, an almost forgotten work ethic that only us geezers with good memories recall.

This makes me wish to do a shout-out of THANKS! to all people who rise above their potentially humdrum jobs. The people who take time to find some joy and satisfaction in the hands they are dealt. The people who tend to do that special one little thing beyond the call of duty and cause an involuntary smile to appear on a customer’s face.

Makes me want to be a better worker myself

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

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