Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/idlingbus.mp3

or read his story below:

WHAT’S BETTER THAN INHALING BEHIND AN IDLING BUS?

She is standing before an old stained-glass church that houses the honors program at a local university. She is working on her tobaccolaureate degree.

Alone, she puffs away, gazing wistfully at the branches of a big tree, who knows what,  going through her mind.

If you take time to look, you’ll see other nicotined scholars, only they seem more isolated than they were prior to the advent of palmed phones.

Back then, puffers were the last sociable people on earth. They stood in groups before buildings high and low, chatting and sharing and signifying and learning more about each other than they’d ever learn inside their cocooned work places, where they stared at  screens or dozed spasmodically or filed nails or filed files.

Outside, in the particulated air, they grew to know little things about the people they seldom spoke with once inside the buildings.

Then, the pod people devices came along, so that now, even though puffers still stand outside, many only talk into the ether to people whose bodies are not present, ignoring fellow solitudes who stand just inches away, talking into their armpits as if their conversations deal with life-threatening issues. Or they speak silently with pecking thumbs.

Me? What do I inhale each day that is half better than what these folks inhale?

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/theartoffloortoceilingimagineering.mp3

or read his story below:

THE ART OF FLOOR-TO-CEILING IMAGINEERING 

Jimmy Three is lying flat on his back in the living room of his family home. He is staring at the hard-plaster ceiling and contemplating the cracks that zigzag here and there, going nowhere in particular. Jimmy Three is just a kid, back here in the 1950′s when this scene is taking place.

Alone in the asbestos-shingled bungalow he shares with two parents, two sisters, two brothers, he is enjoying the silence of the moment and doing what he does best: ruminating and cogitating and fantasizing and thinking real hard.

Right now, Jimmy Three is wondering where his inspirations are buried. Over the years, he has hidden things so that he or somebody might find these things and gleefully re-experience them someday. For instance, there is a note squirreled away between the insulation  and roofing in the back of the house, and he can no longer get to the note. He has no idea what this message to himself says, because it has been so long since he hid it there during construction of the room.

In the back yard is another secreted treasure–a small box with important but now forgotten objects that he wants to dig up. However, he is unable to locate the spot because the secret map to this burial site is also missing.

Jimmy Three blinks and stares harder at the ceiling, massaging ideas and poems and stories in his head but not yet being brave enough to set them down on paper. These compositions will float and flourish for decades until the day comes when he will regurgitate them in the form of columns and books and blasts and blogs and podcasts. Some will remain hidden. Some will inspire others. Some will simply exist.

Finally, life intervenes and motivates Jimmy Three to arise from the floor, dust himself off, grab a snack, pocket a pad of writing paper and a pencil, and leave the house before any family members return. They might not understand the significance of his lying afloor and appearing to be doing not a thing in the world.

Another hidden note: Jimmy Three knows that these few minutes have been busy and activity-filled and reanimating for him. He knows, too, that those in the family who are not imagineers will think him idle.

But he also is aware that there are fellow dreamers among them who will someday blossom and expose their hidden treasures to appreciators, too.

Appreciators who will have not a clue as to how much floor-time goes into molding a work of art into something visible or audible

 © 2016 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Twitter and Facebook

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/relatiiverelativity.mp3

or read his story below:

RELATIVE RELATIVITY

 DEAR DIARY:

Einstein was right. Everything is relative.

What Einstein failed to go on to say is: Relativity is EVERYTHING. In fact, relativity is EVERYBODY.

We are all related in some manner, a fact at once beguiling and frustrating, at times horrifying to think (did I really come from the same evolutionary roots as that third-world dictator and that European princess?), and at times provocative (I may share wellsprings with Einstein himself or Nelson Mandela, or even Charlie Chaplin).

If we are all kin, most of us don’t like to admit it except when it’s convenient.

Sometimes, the same folks who go on and on about how they’ve traced their roots all the way back to King Henry or the Vikings, are the same folks who don’t like to talk about the fact that if they go far enough back before that, they are also kin to Kunta Kinte, Adolf Hitler, Moses, Rube Goldberg, Henny Youngman and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Within the bowels, we share common ancestry–and you have to believe that, whether you’re an evolutionist or a religionist.

So, if we’re all in the same family, why do we treat cousins and sisters and offspring different from neighbors, foreigners and aliens? Why is our own blood so much more palatable than a stranger’s? Why are my lawn weeds nicer than your lawn weeds?

It’s not only a small world, it’s a world interwoven with genes and bloodlines and ancestries. Unfortunately, it’s also a world of many fences and few gates, a world of barely-suppressed hostility that can become offensive at any given moment, a world of more should-have’s than can-do’s, a world where the meek, though blessed, are often oppressed simply because they do not place aggression at the top of their priority lists.

Where is the good in the world, then, you ask?

Well, it’s like everything else in the universe–the good is there, you simply have to fade the bad stuff out for a while so you can notice it.

An audience laughing at the same humor is sharing a commonality that transcends the petty differences of the moment.

An old man stopping to pat a small child on the head is making a quantum leap in time and without knowing it, is by the same act, massaging the cosmos with a bit of kindness.

A firefighter who suddenly and without thinking risks life and limb to save the life of someone who in normal situations wouldn’t seem worth the extension of a cordial greeting…that firefighter is unconsciously affirming the fragile but extensive thread of hope that cobwebs the world and makes itself available at the strangest times.

It’s out there. You have to either take time to notice it, or act quickly when the kindness urge strikes, so that you won’t have time to figure out why you should not be doing something so wimpy as generating an unconditional act of sweetness

 © 2016 A.D. by Jim Reed

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Twitter and Facebook

                       (adapted from the book Dad’s Tweed Coat, Small Wisdoms Hidden Comforts Unexpected Joys by Jim Reed)