Listen to Jim’s podcast:  https://youtu.be/adU4x_8LBNM

or read his thoughts below…

QUICK! BEFORE IT ROLLS UNDER SOMETHING!

Small Wisdoms Hidden Comforts Unexpected Joys

That is the working title of my upcoming book, in which I jot down errant ideas that, if not transcribed, will simply tumble out, fall to the floor, then roll under something. I am herewith quoting myself and no-one else!

Here’s a page from the book:

“It has been many years since I first occurred.”

“I think, therefore I might be.”

“Temptation is always so…tempting.”

“My enemy cannot take this moment from me. It’s the one thing my enemy cannot take. For the moment is already gone, too late to steal.”

“If precocious is a word, why isn’t postcocious a word?”

“If you keep an open mind won’t your thoughts tumble out?”

“Climb every molehill.”

“The purpose of all my writing is to pose the question, ‘Is this just me?’”

“There is no future like the present.”

“One day I will write a book about things not meant for what they will become.”

“I plan to die happy. Except for the dying part.”

“I like to brag about not being a braggart.”

“Write down your thoughts and feelings and inspirations. They just might mean something to your reader. Refrain from making judgments about what you write. You the writer are not competent to determine what is important and what is unimportant, so get out of the way of what you write and allow others to absorb or critique. You are merely taking dictation from your innards. Let it out. Let it happen!”

“Filling time is about all we do, whether or not we actually do anything.”

“Time is ephemeral but strangely real–no other unit of measure makes as much sense.”

“One task of the writer is to record all the disappearing reference points.”

“As I have traversed all these years, with myself as traveling companion, having never deserted Me, isn’t it about time I made friends with Me?”

“How many years will it take for you to become the person you always were?”

“I can’t get very far without my body.”

“What it is possible for me to become is beneath my hopes.”

“I seem to rely upon other people to make me feel bad. Why can’t I just feel bad on my own?”

“I believe in special moments and the disconnected interstices that come between them.”

“The flash of inspiration is the only truth, the only beauty, worth recording.”

“To pay appropriate homage to life it is important to thank Goodness whenever possible. Thank Goodness!”

” If my mind wanders, it can’t get far because it is tethered to the body within which I reside.”

“Would that I had been born fully grown, fully mature. Bid misspent time return!”

“An actual physical object is worthy of preservation because it is there to remind us of what happened when, what happened where, and what when and where felt like in the palm of a hand.”

“Wisdom imparted by the wind would be called a wind advisory.”

“Innocent bystanders. Where is the proof they are innocent?”

“My greatest hope is that Science will find Cheese Curls to be a sure path to a healthy life.”

“What is it I know that I have yet to learn?”

“If you speak the unspeakable, it isn’t.”

“I am the last Me standing.”

“Filling time is anything we do or do not do.”

“If you build it, there is no telling whether anybody will come.”

“Sooner or later is way too early.”

“Her shallowness ran deep.”

“I’m so skeptical I’m skeptical about my skepticism.”

“If you’ve never been bad, how will you know when you’re being good?”

“Why do people only have flights of fancy? Can’t one occasionally enjoy a seavoyage of fancy or a hike of fancy?”

“Acceptance is the only real test of a civilized world.”

“The curse of youth is that they think they have time.”

“Of all the Duddies I know, I am the Fuddiest.”

“Our fellow travelers are watching us, so we must set inspiring standards of behavior. If we fail to do this, what good are we?”

“Living a kindly life is difficult. Difficult is the only way anything good ever gets done.”

“I cannot keep my hands off books or my mind off the beauty of words and stories.”

“Don’t deny the enemy’s existence, just show the Universe that the enemy does not matter, has no effect, exerts zero control…over your innate ability to chuckle.”

“The present does not have much heft, since it is either immediately in the past or immediately about to happen.”

As I note, this is an excerpt from my next book. No telling how many thoughts have tumbled out and fled while I wasn’t paying attention

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute podcast:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbI3e3I5hZY

or read his words below:

NEXT IN LINE THROUGH GRITTED TEETH, PLEASE

The long gray line inches forward. Inch by inch, of course.

For a moment I am at the far end of the line, but I soon shed that status when other people queue up behind me. We are all temporary victims, er, postal patrons, waiting our turn at posting packages to far away climes.

Since we are in a long gray line we slowly become grayish and glum in order to match the gray and glum clerks whose mood is…gray and glum.

Just another day in postal service paradise. Just two clerks to service the long gray line.

Every few minutes, without looking up from the gray and glum counter, a clerk will shout out NEXT IN LINE! The uninitiated patrons do not first respond, since all they hear is the voice of someone saying something like NEXT’NLINE! No way to tell what this means the first time you hear it.

Eventually, a more experienced patron will nudge the nextinline person and say, “That means you.” As if startling oneself from a deep sleep, the nextinline looks around, sees a clerk with no customer, and makes the assumption that it’s time to go get postalized.

Once more, the line inches forward, then pauses.

The clerk mumbles something so muttery and rote that it’s barely understandable, SORRYFORTHEWAIT. It’s a mandated statement with no meaning, so it does not stand on its own as a sincere apology.

No matter, the patron is relieved at getting on with the transaction and escaping this gray place, the sooner the better.

Just as the line gets longer, one of the two clerks slaps down a CLOSED sign and disappears into the cavern behind her. The remaining clerk just keeps on keeping on, trying to be efficient, even polite at times, to diminish the line.

Once in a while the gray clerk brightens up when someone she knows arrives. They chat merrily. I am relieved that there is humanity acting itself out. I am not amused that this means the line will stop until the clerk is good and ready to reboot.

There are some ways I can help myself get through these moments. I can go postal and get all wrought up over much of nothing. Or I can enjoy the experience, talk and signify with my temporary nearby gray line neighbors. I can amuse myself by gazing at the posters designed to make me happy at being at the mercy of the system. I can watch the interaction between one glum and gray employee whose job is to tote boxes half her size from the outside, swing them up onto the counter, wipe sweat from her brow, then exit into the cavern to join her fellow worker.

Eventually, the second clerk reappears and yells NEXT IN LINE!

Life is back to normal.

As the gray line progresses, a flashback occurs. Way back when, when I visit London, the railway and tube clerks all exhibit the same behavior as these postal clerks. Through gritted teeth, they are required to constantly apologize for the lateness of the trains or the inconvenience of the people-processing.

WE APOLOGIZE! is repeated every minute or so, always through gritted teeth, always with some kind of repressed rage. Kind of scary. Just like right here, right now, at the big ol’ gray post office.

I finally get lucky and am faced with the only clerk who voluntarily smiles and converses while taking care of my packages. This is a blessing and I am appreciating it. We even share quips and jokes!

Then, as suddenly as it appears, her smile disappears after the transaction and she braces for the next patron after me. She also braces for the glum disapproval of the other clerk, who is thinking, What’s this good mood stuff all about? Something must be wrong with her. No good deed will remain unpunished.

I escape the gray line, rush to the gray parking lot and drive away, relieved and chuckling.

That wasn’t so bad, was it? I say to myself

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 3-minute podcast:  https://youtu.be/QQBzh8ecwT8

or read below:

ONE MORE STRING OF PEARLS WEST OF EDEN

The incredible shrinking customer returns to the bookshop this morning.

Leaning forward as she rapidly walks straight ahead, she looks neither right nor left. Speaks not.

As she walks, she lists slightly to one side, steering her frail body toward a favorite category, vintage children’s books.

Maud is her name.

Maud has been entering the shop off and on for years, avidly searching for just the right titles to fill her evening, to fill her bookcase.

She seems to be diminishing in size, so that she is perhaps just under five feet tall these days.

Quickly, she brings two Lucy Maud Montgomery books to the counter and gruffly asks, “How much?”

As usual, I check the prices and report them, at which point she seems disapproving but accepting. Just how she manages to reject and accept simultaneously is a mystery.

She slings her backpack to the floor, digs into a bulging and tattered wallet, issues forth the required cash.

“Would you like a bag?” I ask, since the answer changes with each transaction.

“No,” she says, this day re-packaging her billfold and slipping the volumes into the darkened depths of the pack.

I say something innocuous about what a good writer Lucy Maud was, just to add a cheery period/paragraph to the morning.

She smiles and barks, “Yeah, it’s an easy read.”

I think to myself, I’m an easy Reed, too—–since I process customer interchanges, both boisterous and brisk, with the everlasting intention of leaving myself feeling better.

I hope to get a grin or two out of each book client. When this works, I am happy with my day and my Self. When it fails, I try to determine how things could have gone better.

Maud the incredible shrinking woman slings her backpack aft and teeters forward and sideways toward the door and her next encounter with street life.

I grab a sticky note and jot down a few words about Maud. In my mind, this moment is a wonderful translucent pearl that I stuff into my pocketful of pearls for later examination.

Each time I sit down to record these pearls, I retrieve additional wads of notes, arrange them chronologically, and eventually string them together into something I can report to you, my invisible reader.

I remind myself that I live and work just a few miles west of Eden, Alabama. I always give a Nod to the small town as I pass, a castaway eastbound to find books and pearls and people.

The books and pearls remain constants in my life, but as time passes the incredible shrinking people always seem to grow larger 

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/FROM%20DOWNTOWN%20TO%20DOGTOWN.mp3

or read his story below:

FINDING THE SOLITUDES OF DOGTOWN AND DOWNTOWN

Here’s what happened one Alabama night some years ago.

It still stands out in my Red Clay Diary

 Tonight I find myself atop a mountain in Dogtown, south of Fort Payne,  north of Collinsville, watching a clear cool sky and feeling the wideness of the open spaces around me.

Just east of where I am standing, the red planet Mars appears on the horizon, and to the west the diamond-bright planet Venus is about to be occluded by the trees below.

It is a night to take a deep breath and wonder why you can see so many more stars on this mountain, stars that you can’t see in Downtown Birmingham. Years ago, when Reed Books was located within the Wooster Lofts on First Avenue North, I would climb four flights of stairs above my bookloft at night to gaze at the city–Vulcan would wave from afar, aircraft would whoosh past to land—then leave—the airport, lone walkers would dodge the occasional automobile on the streets below. Above, the moon would moon me, a meteor would give me an instant razz, and I could see a bright star or steady planet cruising on by.

Anyhow, back to this night, where my mind is right now. I’ve come to this mountain, two hours from Birmingham, to speak to a gathering of volunteer chaplains who make sure that hospital patients are not alone spiritually when they don’t want to be.  Inside the restaurant—much warmer than the outside mountain air—I find folks who are relaxed and happy about where they live and what they do, in Dekalb and Cherokee Counties. They are close to Mentone and Chattanooga, not too far from Birmingham, but far enough away to feel like country folks when they need to.

It’s clear to me, a couple of hours later, as I hurtle back towards Downtown Birmingham, that most of us find a way to have some peace and quiet midst the hustle and smoke and sounds of the city. Folks back in Dogtown can go to people-laden places whenever they need a break from solitude…folks in Downtown Birmingham can find solitude when they’re done with crowds. In Downtown, I see loners finding occasional solitude in their idling cars, in pocket parks, within their earpods, behind their closed-lidded eyes, inside a restroom or in a stock room, on a streetside bench, in a quiet loft room, on the back pew of an empty church. I notice people who, even in a crowd, can find solitude for a moment—at a symphony concert, in the corner at a cocktail party, inside a book huddling in an alcove.

So, Dogtown and Downtown are just names we give places. In each place, people can find what they need if they use a bit of imagination.

Back in Birmingham the next day, as I leave work, I walk onto the parking deck adjacent to the century-old building that houses shop. It is nearly dark and the sunset is spectacular in the middle of the city. To the west, I can see First Avenue South running straight toward the sun. To the north, the truncated skyscraper we used to call the Daniel Building shows evidence that some employees haven’t fled yet—perhaps they’re taking in a bit of solitude before fighting the traffic. To the east, Mars is struggling to be seen again, and a solitary aircraft dips towards the landing strip.

I breathe deeply, realizing that, whether it’s Dogtown or Downtown, I can always find a sky and an interlude just when I need it most

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed