Hear Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast:  https://youtu.be/9rkRZIgcDGQ

or read his story…

Deep South Tales Both Actual and True

THE HISTORIC BIG SANDY CREEK WATERMELON SEED SKIRMISH 

Uncle Sam’s big shiny-toothed smile is directed at me one scorching summer afternoon. He stands waist-deep in icy water, waiting for me to take my next deep breath.

It’s the longest deep breath I’ve ever held.

I’m standing barefoot and swimming-suited atop a time-smoothed boulder on the banks of Big Sandy Creek near Tuscaloosa, just a few years after the end of World War II.

My life hangs in the balance as I try to make an important decision.

I must decide whether and when to jump into the coldest cold water in my  known universe. Big Sandy is always chilling to the senses, way colder than any other creek or stream anywhere around, making it difficult for most of us kids and relatives to tolerate it for long. Will I enter or will I retreat?

I take one more look around me, looking for a sign, but all I see is cousins and aunts and uncles and parents. They are all preoccupied with the duties of summer—-skimming pebbles across running waters, spreading blankets on the red clay ground, opening picnic baskets and spreading snacks and goodies about, shooing flies and gnats away from body and edibles, playing tag among the pines, hiking up swimming trunks that are soggy and descending, heaving a large watermelon from the water, sunning themselves on grass and stone.

I can’t hold my breath any longer. My toes are twitching, curling in anticipation of slamming into barely tolerable  temperatures. My hesitancy hordes a secret, and that secret is the fact that I do not know how to swim and that I would rather Uncle Sam did not learn this fact. He’s been known to toss kids into water just to see whether they know how to swim or whether they are skilled at sinking like stones.

There has got to be a way to avoid becoming one of Uncle Sam’s experiments.

Splat!

That’s the sudden sound of a small dark missile bouncing off my right temple. I snap a sideways glance just in time to spy Cousin Jerry squeezing a watermelon seed between thumb and finger, aiming a second volley at my head.

All my attention is diverted. I jump off the boulder onto the bank and run toward the watermelon slices that Mother has just laid out for us. Jerry is chasing me with his cocked and loaded seed, and I am in survival mode, grabbing a slice for myself, munching into the red sweetness in order to retrieve two seeds.

I turn to Jerry, whose seedy bullet has just missed me, giving me the two seconds I need to spurt a seed at him. A nicely aimed hit to his shoulder. The Big Sandy Creek Watermelon Seed Skirmish begins!

Soon, several of us kids and adults are ducking and shooting seeds and generally laughing ourselves silly.

This is my kind of war. Nobody wins, nobody loses. We just have a good time jumping headlong out of our hot summer day routines. The rewards are immense—-we eat some really good watermelon, we run ourselves ragged, we express our happiness and camaraderie in a harmless and memorable manner, and some of us even venture into Big Sandy Creek.

Those of us who can’t swim keep Uncle Sam at a distance. Those who know how to swim have a great time with uncles and aunts and kin.

The day is a happy one, and Big Sandy Creek remains fresh in memory to this day, though I never returned to the scene of the battle. I don’t know what happened to the big smooth boulder. I don’t even know whether Big Sandy waters remain to this day the coldest in the universe.

I do know this. To this day, I do not know how to swim. To this day, seedless watermelons seem not quite normal. To this day, I would give much to enjoy just one more golden afternoon cavorting with loved and lovely family members during a harmless war, the kind of war I wish everybody knew how to wage

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Deep South Memories from a Red Clay Diary…

 Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast:  https://youtu.be/KBpBESt1RmY

or read his memoir below:

TEMPTATION IS WAY TOO TEMPTING

After spending ten years as a new member of my species, I begin to realize that I am in way over my head.

Way back yonder—right now, inside my diary—in the 1950s, everything seems so new, so fresh, so exciting, so…tempting.

Fortunately for me, I have my family and playmates and neighbors and teachers and relatives to keep me in line. Mostly. They are here to protect me, show me the way, warn me when I venture too far off-track, mend me when I crack or bruise or break.

This protective dome of caring and nurturing is keeping me alive and well till I can strike out on my own, which won’t be for another few years.

But the temptations remain.

When I am all alone and no-one is looking, I still am not really all alone. I keep picturing two funny and scary characters who people my world: upon my left shoulder smolders a tiny laughing, horned and pointy-tailed little red devil who eggs me on when I want to misbehave or bend unwritten rules or snap commandments in two. Upon my right shoulder resides a tiny angelic whispering little guy who whispers goodness in my ear, who pulls me back from the brink of sin and misbehavior.

These small beings are real enough in fertile imagination to balance me in my lifetime tightrope walk. Much of the time. And they fill in when I meander through solitude.

Characters like the devil and the angel formed themselves out of B-movies, comic books, Sunday school dogma, radio dramas, and stern adults who look out for my safety.

In these 1950s I don’t get away with much, at least until teenagedom encroaches and those temptations take on a hormonal power that cannot be ignored.

Now, some numerous decades later, I no longer see the angel and the devil, I no longer enjoy the safety of my long-gone grown-up protectors. Now I am fully aware that I am on my own, that I must answer to myself when I stray or when I have unacceptable inclinations. I am my own boss…which means I cannot blame anybody but myself for infractions, I cannot delegate guilt or regret to anyone but Me.

Dang! Being a grownup means I don’t look like a kid anymore. But it doesn’t mean that I am not still a kid deep within, a kid enjoying the idea of temptation, if not the reality of it.

I have become the avatar of all those families and playmates and neighbors and teachers and relatives who jump-started me. I feel free and confident and ready to face the snarkies and the meanies…most of the time.

But I keep an imaginary swatter nearby just in case the shoulder critters return one day to once again take over and confuse me. I never forget to thank them silently, these real and imaginary people who ushered me across the darkened chasm. These beings who slapped me together, patched and instructed me, brought me safely from way back then to right now, to this very minute.

Who kept me around just long enough to impart my fragile wisdom to an unexpected reader…You

© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed

Listen to Jim’s audio podcast: https://youtu.be/QYkek_Q6sJw

or read his story below…

THE FAR AGO AND LONG AWAY REUNION OF THE SPIRITS

Far ago and long away, I dreamed a dream one day.

The time is far, far ago, but it is ever fresh in memory. Some of the best times of my life were spent in Peterson, a village between Tuscaloosa and Brookwood, a stripped-out mining town. In Peterson resided my maternal grandparents, as well as various aunts and uncles and cousins, and back then, some many years ago, all us kinfolk liked nothing better than to converge and reunite and party together on a Sunday afternoon.

Now this may not be you young’uns’ idea of partying, but it was everything we knew to do, in order to have a good time. The time is long away, but here’s what a McGee reunion felt like:

Dried butterbeans under a tree in Uncle Pat and Aunt Elizabeth McGee’s sideyard. No, we didn’t eat the butterbeans except one time, and once was enough. What my uncles did with the butterbeans was use them instead of chips, to sit on the ground and play poker. The summertime buggy and humid heat was barely noticed, because the Games and the Slow Roast were the thing. Two games went on simultaneously. The poker game—in which all the winner got was a bunch of dried beans—and the baseball game on the radio. You see, back then, nobody had portable radios, so the Big Game emanated from one of the old cars in the family. One uncle would pull his car near the Game and leave the door open so we could all hear the big plays, the excited crowd, the crisp snap of wood against hide, the terse shouts of the umpire.

The Slow Roast was right next to the game—big hunks of pork turning over an open-pit fire, smoking up the surrounding woods and forcing all humans who care about eating to salivate involuntarily. Cousin Patricia reported six decades later that, after we’ve eaten, Uncle Buddy reveals that it is goat meat—not pork.

This was Division of Labor stuff back then. The men were in charge of staying up all night, tending the cooking, biding their time with poker and baseball, and trying their best to set sedentary examples of good behavior for dozens of run-amok kids. The women did everything else.

Mind you, this was the post-economic-depression era when all men worked hard at hard-time jobs, when Sundays with family were their only respite, when for a few hours they could pretend to be hotshot gamblers and master chefs and wizened tribal chiefs.

Meanwhile, cousins and their playmates were free to roam wild in Uncle Pat’s woods, chase after and be chased by spiders and snakes, attract redbugs and ticks, laugh out loud and wrestle, play their own baseball game in the nearby cornfield, pretend to be feral Tarzans and Noble Savages and in general let out all that energy that had been pent up during the week.

The women would cook and wrangle kids and socialize and gossip and knit and darn and set tables and wash dishes and collect detritus that the men would later dispose of. Both men and women would share in the arduous task of making gallons of ice cream on the spot, emptying ice and salt into buckets while older kids took turns cranking and cranking and cranking, their only motivation being the sweet taste of fresh peaches absorbed into the creamiest ice cream you could ever imagine.

Everybody knew their responsibilities in those days, nobody hid from helping out, everyone came to each other’s rescue when a bruise appeared, all accidents were tended to in gentle good humor, all conflicts were mediated and peacefully settled, all passions channeled for the good of the one-day commune.

At the end of the long day, each family would sit wearily and happily in automobiles waiting while relatives leaned close to the rolled-down car window and said 45-minute lingering goodbyes to each other. Nobody wanted to leave the scene, everybody had to, and, regardless of how tired and spent and scraped and bloated and bugbit each of us was, we couldn’t help but think about the next reunion when we’d do it all again.

Yep, far ago and long away, I dreamed a dream, a dream that still seems true when I look at the results of those strong and handsome adult relatives who set such powerful examples for us kids. The truth is in watching those kids today, now elderly kinfolk with their own kids and kids of kids, each year once more holding a reunion and passing down the generations a rich appreciation of tribe and family and genetics and mutual support.

It’s all still there, and the next reunion is next month, and I’m salivating already

Listen to Jim’s podcast: https://youtu.be/ZFH9D77DfBE

or read on…

Deep South Memories, Both Actual and True…

IMAGINEERING THE MAGIC CEILING

I am lying flat on my back in the living room of my childhood home, staring at the hard-plaster ceiling and contemplating the cracks that zigzag here and there, going nowhere in particular.

At this moment I am just Me as a kid, back here in the 1950′s when this scene—actual and true—is taking place.

Alone in the asbestos-shingled bungalow I share with two parents, two sisters, two brothers, I am enjoying the silence of the moment and doing what I do best: ruminating and cogitating and fantasizing and thinking real hard.

I am rarely alone in the house, so times like this are special.

Right now, I am wondering where my inspirations are buried. Over the years, I have hidden things so that I or some futuristic person might find these things and gleefully re-experience them someday.

For instance, there is a note squirreled away between insulation  and roofing in the back of the house. I can no longer get to this note. It is a message to myself, but I have no idea what this message contains, because it has been so long since I hid it there back while the add-on room was under construction.

In the back yard is yet another secreted treasure–-a small box with important but now forgotten objects that I want to dig up. However, I am unable to locate the spot because the hand-drawn secret map to this burial site has gone missing in the chaos of childhood.

I blink blink and stare harder at the ceiling cracks, massaging ideas and poems and stories in my head, not yet brave enough to set them down on paper. After all, only Writers can accomplish this, and I dare not call myself a writer.

These compositions will float and flourish for decades until the day comes when I 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 find Appreciators.

Some will simply exist…waiting.

Finally, life intervenes and motivates me to arise from the floor, dust myself 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 my lying afloor and appearing to be doing not a thing in the world.

Another hidden note: I alone know that these few minutes have been busy and activity-filled and reanimating for me. I know, too, that those in the family who are not imagineers will think me idle.

But I also am aware that there are younger, upcoming fellow dreamers among them  who may yet blossom and expose their hidden treasures to Appreciators, too. Who may gaze deeply into the plaster cracks to see what lurks there, what hibernates there.

Appreciators who will have not a clue as to how much floor-time goes into crafting a work of art into something visible and alive

© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ahLIw13hY&feature=youtu.be

or read his story below…

NOWHERE NEAR TALL AND STRIKINGLY HANDSOME

I am the merest mere pre-teen you can possibly picture in your mind today, since I am somewhere back in time at the moment.

I the merest kid dare to push the big red Control button that transports me from today, all the way back to the first summer of the 1950′s.

The bombastic march from Puccini’s opera AIDA is about to begin as we kids of Vacation Bible School queue up and prepare to proceed lockstep into the cool interior of Forest Lake Baptist Church. Vacation Bible School is the only day camp my parents can afford, so to this day it is Summer Camp in sweet memory.

A loudspeaker crackles, a rusting needle descends to a rapidly spinning 78 rpm recording, and AIDA begins.

The hot summer sun weighs upon us as we dutifully descend into the shaded interior of the church.

As mere youth, we kids have no choice as to whether we will attend this camp. Indeed, we really don’t worry about whether it is desirable, we just welcome the break from being home all day every day with not much adventure in store.

The music ends and the needle noisily amplifies the endless blank groove until someone remembers to lift it and kill the volume. We stand silently in rows awaiting further instructions.

Finally, the director, Mrs. Campbell, joyfully greets us, leads us in prayer while we peek around to see who else is peeking around, then permits us to sit on the hard wooden pews. Today we are to recite memorized bible verses. I am thankful that we do this as a group, allowing me to mouth words I don’t quite remember.

Later, volunteer adults show us how to do crafts and clumsy arts. I get to build a lopsided lightly sanded-and-painted wooden kitchen shelf in the shape of an apple. This is a gift for Mother’s kitchen, a gift she keeps on display for the next seventy years.

Break-time Kool-Aid and cookies save my life while a 16-mm projector briefly entertains us with black and white cartoons and movie previews featuring heroes such as Gregory Peck and Popeye and Buck Rogers. What brings me back to the 1950′s today is the red button and a blurb about Gregory Peck that describes him as “tall and strikingly handsome,” a phrase I realize, even this early in life, will never be applied to the likes of me.

Short and strikingly wimpy, I still manage to find some pleasure in activities such as dodge ball and checkers, hymn-singing and hide-and-seek, and quiet time breaks while we study verses.

A decade or so later, when I am a public radio announcer, I queue up a recording of an entire opera and listen raptly, suddenly surprised when the march turns out to be my very own summer school march.

AIDA.

Till now, I never knew the name of the tune, but suddenly it brings memories of bliss, it introduces me to the world of grand opera, it resuscitates the best of what good spirits I still carry with me.

Thanks to AIDA and day camp, I can find respite in time travel, I can be at peace as a strikingly individualistic non-tall dreamer whose purpose is to remind those who read these words that there are enough fond memories stored up inside us to comfort and put us at ease just in time to face another day.

Just push the big red button

© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed