Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/regardingthethousandandone.mp3

or read his comments below:

REGARDING THE THOUSAND AND ONE MUST-DO UNREWARDED KINDNESSES

I am walking gingerly, leaning into the gray wind of a gray day, dancing around gray asphalt cracks and humps to maintain balance long enough to enter the safety of the nearby store.

Everything seems like gray routine. The gray familiarity of this frequented trek is passing by so little noticed or noted that I could close my eyes and still find the door I seek.

Fluttering just behind and to the left of me is a gray figure navigating toward the  same destination. Her clothing is parachuting about her small frame, disrupting her course and causing her to exert extra effort to reach the entrance.

I automatically reach out to open the door, step aside to motion her through ahead of me, only just now paying attention to her face and the strands of hair crisscrossing her vision.

She hesitates to enter and I bow to indicate I’m waiting for her to precede me.

She glances at me for the first time, popping out of her strained inner thoughts long enough to raise her eyebrows,widen her eyes, and stare through me as if to say, “Why would you do something so nice for me? For someone like me? Of all people?”

I smile reassurance, she accepts my old-fashioned gentlemanly act just long enough to enter.

I follow her into the store, but she is already rushing across the aisles as if to avoid having to confirm a stranger’s kindness that must surely be misguided. As if to say, “You may change your mind and decide I’m not worthy of this act. I don’t want to face that possibility.”

The moment is a mere wisp. The gray routine of the gray day bears down upon us and we go our permanent separate ways toward indefinable destinies

© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

 http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/uncleadronandthetithightemporary.mp3

or read his story below:

A special story from long ago, re-discovered within the pages of my Red Clay Diary:

UNCLE ADRON AND THE TIT-HIGH TEMPORARY

NO-TRAIN WATER-RESERVOIR RAILROAD RIDE

Uncle Adron is bouncing up and down, head nearly bopping the ceiling of his Model-A Ford automobile, each time he pops upward. He’s bouncing involuntarily about every second, so that you could set your watch by the sound of his bottom hitting the seat on the front driver’s side.

Uncle Adron is bouncing along because he’s driving one way across a railroad trestle in Lilita, Alabama. One way along a one-track traintrack, heading east.

The wheels of the Model-A don’t quite fit inside the parallel tracks, don’t quite fit onto the surfaces of the rails, and aren’t quite far enough apart to fit on the outer sides of the rails. So, the Model-A automobile is riding kind of side-saddle, the driver’s side wheels on the outer edge of the rails’ north side, the passenger-side wheels nudging the inner edge of the rails’ south side.

Below the trestle is water. No bridge. No road. No field. Just water. The water came from nowhere last night–at least, the water came from the sky in torrential rains and caused water to fill up the small valley under the train trestle. A lake appears where grazing grass lay yesterday, Saturday. A road had cut through that pasture on Saturday, the road that Adron and his three companions had travelled on westward early Saturday morning.

Right now, on Sunday, Adron is steering the Model-A to the east, trying to get home safely, hoping that the lumber mill behind him is closed on Sundays. It is the lumber company for which the railroad trestle exists, and trains usually go to and from the mill–when the mill is open for business.

At this moment, Adron is operating on his usual stock of blind faith and extra ounces of sheer gut and willpower. He’s hoping that the old tenant farmer who manages the hunting lodge nearby is right: “Nassuh, that sawmill don’t open on Sunday. Ain’t no train today!”

If the farmer is correct, Uncle Adron doesn’t have to worry about being hit by a train. All he has to worry about now is controlling the Model-A as it enters no-person’s land in the middle of the trestle, bumping over and intimately feeling each and every crosstie under the tracks. One moment of concentration broken could make those wheels slip beyond the trestle and the rails and the crossties.

Limping ahead of Uncle Adron, scouting to be sure there are no broken crossties or other surprises along the track, is Tommy Reed, my father. In the 1940′s, when Tommy and Adron are still young enough to have adventures such as this, Tommy is the cautious one, Adron the daring one.

Behind the Model-A, following like careful sheep, are Brandon McGee and Jack (Buddy) McGee, my uncles.

The four men have spent the weekend doing what they like best–travelling from Tuscaloosa past Epes, past Livingston, to go to the shack they call The Hunting Lodge in Lilita–a shack in the middle of nowhere (Lilita being almost nowhere, you see)–where they can have a few laughs, a few smokes, a chaw or two, without any visible signs of the heavy responsibilities they carry on their shoulders during the work week.

The Hunting Lodge is a place to listen to the silence, clean weapons, and talk without talking aloud, laugh now and then about the silliness of life and the predicaments they find themselves in now and then–and Now.

Earlier in the day, the four hunters weigh their possibilities, looking at that water below the trestle and wondering how deep it is, wondering whether they risk getting into even more trouble by trying to drive that Model-A Ford into and across the water. At last, help arrives. A large cow saunters to the edge of the lake that was on Friday its dinner buffet of mixed greens. The men stiffen and watch silently. If the cow walks across the water safely, they’ll take their chances in the Model-A. After another thoughtful pause–or thoughtless, as the case may be–the cow walks into the water and freezes.

“As soon as I seen that water go over the cow’s tits, I know’d it was too deep to drive across,” Uncle Adron tells me, a full fifty years later.

That’s when the four men–Tommy, Uncle Adron, Uncle Brandon and Uncle Buddy–put their heads together and come up with the Master Plan.

Now, here is Uncle Adron, bouncing up and down as the car lopes over the crossties one by one, looking down from the driver’s seat at nothing but a great expanse of uninvited and uninviting water, sticking his head out to see if he still has the feel of the car wheels hugging the train tracks.

And that’s the story.

Did Uncle Adron survive his adventure so that he could tell it to me fifty years later? I just told you that, didn’t I?

Did Uncle Buddy avoid having to jump into the lake to keep from being run over by a train, so that he could move to Harlingen, Texas, and raise a family and try to forget all the atrocities he’d seen as a paratrooper in World War II?

Did Uncle Brandon survive another day in order to work his father’s general store in Peterson, Alabama, for a few more decades, bringing laughter and fun to two generations of nieces and nephews and grand nieces and grand nephews?

Did Tommy Reed go back to being a carpenter on Monday morning, so that he could spend the next forty years raising kids and grandkids in Tuscaloosa?

Did I, the son of Tommy Reed, live long enough for Uncle Adron Herrin to finally tell me and my brother Tim the tale of the tit-high water reservoir and the one-way train trestle trip without a train in Lilita, Alabama

© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

 http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/uncleadronandthe160acredrive.mp3

or read his tale below…

Red Clay Diary entry

Long, long ago, my brother Ronny and I drove deep into Cottondale, Alabama,

to do some time traveling:

UNCLE ADRON AND THE 160-ACRE BEAVER POND RIDE

My brother Ronny and I are just about ready to give up trying to find Uncle Adron’s 160-acre property in the middle of which sits the home we know he and Aunt Annabelle live in.

“I remember some of the road, so I know it’s around here somewhere,” says Ronny, who was last a visitor here some forty years ago.

Truth is, we are almost lost and not quite found in our search for the old homestead in Tuscaloosa County. Dirt roads and narrow-laned asphalt roads and orange washboard roads run this way and that, and the car I’m driving enters a different time and place and era every few minutes. Mobile homes perch on concrete blocks near century-old breezeway houses, and a little further along there’s a 1950’s ranch-style house with dirt bikes and pickup trucks in front–in back of which an old out-house and shambled barn still struggle to defy the gravity that is soon to pull them down. As we turn from blue road to red clay road, a shack with a satellite dish smugly hides its mysteries.

We finally give in to the 21st Century and whip out a cell phone to get Uncle Adron or somebody to tell us how to find the homestead.

And there it is–deep in the forest, there’s my cousin Harold and some of his brood, and sitting on the front porch in laconic meditation is Uncle Adron, who greets us as though we are dropping by for the second time this week.

There are no strangers in Uncle Adron’s world of family and kin.

As we talk and tour the old wooden house, we feel as if we’ve never left. In some ways, visiting Uncle Adron and Aunt Annabelle is like coming home after a rough day at work and finding out that work and everything else that occurs away from this place are fleeting and paper-thin.

Ronny knows which room he spent the night in 45 years ago, I know where Aunt Annabelle served up chicken and dumplings 50 years ago. We both know that this place in the depth of the countryside is as vivid and timeless as a cool drink of water from an old wooden bucket.

I step outside to clear my head of all these memories that are so sweet and compelling that at any moment they might bring with them a sadness that can’t be swept aside like a spiderweb.

Harold shows us the enormous prefab building where he runs his RFD business, and we look down the lane to see where grandkids live nearby.

“Can you show us around the property?” I ask Harold, certain that a nice brief hike in the woods would be therapeutic.

“You want to see the land?” Harold asks, as if he can’t quite believe that a city slicker would condescend to tour his front and back yards, the yards he sees every day.

“Sure, I’m serious,” I say.

Harold says, “OK,” and I start walking toward the trees.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Isn’t this the way?” I reply.

Harold starts getting into his large four-wheel vehicle. “You want a tour, don’t you?”

I have trouble believing that anybody would actually drive around their yard, rather than walk. Maybe it’s Harold’s bum leg. I get into the truck and yell for Ronny to join us.

Within seconds I understand why we’re trucking rather than walking. Uncle Adron’s property is enormous, and we’re about to see all of it.

Three country dogs appear out of nowhere and start running ahead of the vehicle, not behind it. They know the route, even though there is no visible road.

Harold takes us into deep brush, the car rocks side to side into and over century-old ruts. The limbs and leaves splat against the closed windows and we lose sight of the sun.

Looking behind us, I see no sign of where we’ve been. Ahead, only Harold and the dogs can tell where we’re going to wind up.

What if the truck goes dead? Will we survive out here in the compass-less land that nobody outside our family traverses?

We dive deep into small valleys, pop up into sunlight over brief hillocks, go through a scratchy meadow past natural-gas pumps, and wind up in the completely quiet forest near a beaver pond.

Harold turns off the motor and we roll down the windows.

To a city boy like me and a city boy like Ronny, there is silence. Our silence consists of hearing nothing we’re used to each day: airplanes, cars and trucks, horns, car alarms, shouted invectives, whirring air conditioners, boom boxes.

The silence of the forest takes over and overwhelms us. Insects communicating. Water lapping. Dry grass crunching under dog paws. Panting, wet dogs, frolicking in the pond.

The noisy silence of a million invisible insects going about their work-day, punching in, doing their shifts, living and protecting and procreating and dying in ways we cannot see.

“Sometimes, we come out here and just sit and watch the beavers and just be quiet,” Harold grins.

The dogs play in the water, swimming and snorting and acting like puppies.

And that’s where we remain for a long time, my brother Ronny and I…and that’s where we remain embedded in memory, long after we’ve made our respective treks back to Houston and Birmingham

© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/thesloshingunnamedgoldfishdances.mp3

or read his story below:

THE SLOSHING UNNAMED GOLDFISH DANCES FOR ME AND ME ALONE

Something is sloshing around where things do not normally slosh around.

I am belted into the driver’s seat of an old car, an old car idling shakily in a line of traffic that is itself following rules of the road. We are all obediently waiting for a traffic light to morph from red to yellow to a third color destined to grant us permission to proceed.

As I said, something is wiggling around in my vision. At first I ascribe this to occasional hallucinogenic episodes caused by ocular migraines. But, no, migraine does not seem to be happening.

Then, I spot the source of sloshing.

The left lighted tail light of the car ahead is filled almost to the top with clear fluid. That fluid sloshes around in response to the car’s wobbling motor and the small jerky movements initiated by a fidgety brake foot.

The effect is that of a lava lamp operating at full speed. The only thing missing is goldfish.

I am momentarily mesmerized and entertained by this unexpected random act of art. I wish all tail lights nurtured goldfish and tiny turbulences such as this.

Suddenly the traffic light stops matching the color of the sloshing tail light and we lemmings are off and running toward vaguely manifested destinies.

My bookmobile knows by heart the route I travel so that my mind can wander off to spy upon the next installment of the upcoming thousand and one entertainments

© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.

jim@jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com

http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast