Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/mhE9ga0QCnA

or read his transcript:

FINE CHINA FACE

 Once upon a time or two, way back when, my happy day at the shop is interrupted by the entrance of a customer from some far-away harsh place. She seems so lonely and isolated. I have to take note. I have to record her presence in case I never see her again, in case you never have a chance to meet her…

Her face is like fine china, only it is more like old china, the pale white nearly transparent china that looks as if it would break into a million pieces should you drop it .

Her face looks like brittle pale white china that has indeed incurred stress fractures throughout its surface. Tiny dark lines run delicately about, some parallel, some crossing, some ending abruptly. Like those tiny thin lines that a fortune teller will pay close attention to in the palm of an old withered hand.

She walks steadfastly into the shop. Her gait is the gait of a young woman. Her body is the body of a young woman.

But her face. Oh, her face.

Her face, though obviously young, has been stress-fractured like fine old china, and she is holding that face stiff and straight as if she knows for certain that the act of smiling or even of frowning will cause a million-pieced shattering.

Her face seems frozen into this image that her mind extrudes through her pores, and now she might never smile again, lest she become tiny sparkling flak whirlpooling itself to the impersonal ground where it can never be assembled again in just the same way, the way it once started out.

And so she keeps the expression and holds together the fine piece of china that she is. She is intent upon making it through the day. Or making it through the events that have caused her to decide to stay in one expression, regardless, till something better or something worse comes along.

The fine china woman is just one beautiful solitude on one beautiful day at the shop. She will be followed by other beautiful solitudes as the day goes by. She deserves my attention and your attention. What kindnesses may come from us when we notice? What kindnesses do these beautiful solitudes deserve? What kindnesses will they never experience should you and I fail to heed their deserving presence?

It’s another beautiful day in Mr. Reed’s neighborhood

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/2ZTeRjC3PU8

or read transcript below:

HOW TO THROW A PUNCH

I am lying flat on my back, staring up at off-stage theatrical trappings just out of sight of an audience. This is a theatre and I am an amateur actor, way back in the 1950s.

I lie on the hardwood floor because I am dead, killed by the pen of dramatist Maxwell Anderson.

I perform as well as I can, making sure that the rapt crowd really believes for a suspended moment that I am no longer alive. This means that breathing must be shallow and non-apparent. Eyelids must not flutter. Mouth must be slack. Giggling must not occur.

Being slain in a play is kind of fun. You get to pretend someone else’s life while hiding your actual life from view. And being dead is great. The audience cannot remove its attention from you, even though the living characters continue the scene. Not only do you get lots of attention, but there are no memorized lines to be remembered, to be spoken.

Once you as a character in a play have done your dramatic dying, it’s all over. You can rest backstage later while everybody else continues working. You stick around for curtain call because that’s when the applause will rise in concert with your bow. By the end of the play, audience members will have forgotten what your role is, but they will remember that you fought and died a violent death right in front of them.

But back to the scene. This is one of those performances without curtains. The audience gets to watch the actors leave the stage and the scene-changers re-arrange the props.

At this point in such a production, suspended disbelief breaks through the fourth wall and the audience gasps as the corpse—me—suddenly rises quickly and leaves the stage.

Later on, the play is successfully concluded and we actors get to mingle with instant fans.

One woman singles me out and gushes, “Oh, you were so graceful in that scene.” I just listen because graceful is not a word that has ever been applied to me.

“The way you fell to the floor, how did you manage not to get hurt.?” she does go on. “And suddenly you get up and become alive again!” She furrows her brow and asks intensely, “How do you do that?”

I am too young to come up with sage answers, so I just thank her, sign her program, and continue milling about until cast and crew are ready to pack up and travel to the next town, the next performance, the next dying scene.

When even younger, we playground kids call this play-acting. It is improvised but it is pretty much the same thing I am doing on stages. The difference is, the audience actually believes the story for bit.

In another play, I as a character get to punch another actor. This time, he is the body on the floor for a minute. Of course the punch is fake—you get to learn how to do this in rehearsals and acting classes—but some viewers actually believe it. After this performance, a fan asks me whether I am a trained athlete. I  haven’t the heart to tell her I am a practicing wimp and cannot, in real life, throw a punch or defend myself against one. I just play-act.

Decades later—right now, for instance—I am still haunted by people who believe I am someone I am not and can never be. But I also have these wonderful warm memories of being, just for an instant each time, a jock or an action hero or a resurrected body. And I can go back on my worst days and reminisce about all those people I could be.

And I am really grateful for the fact that no matter how wild and improbable those fictitious folks are, I can still bask in being me. The me who secretly re-visits the other me’s that no-one else can see

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/tombstonemist.mp3

or read his transcript below:

Way back in time, some several decades ago,

I am grabbing lunch at a nearby diner.

Suddenly I see a lone figure…and I realize that this person

is who I will someday become.

Today, it has all come true. I am now that man.

This is my entry into the Red Clay Diary from those many years ago…

TOMBSTONE MIST (A True Time Travel Tale)

An old, stooped man walks gingerly down the street holding his lunchtime book under his arm and heading for the sandwich place he’s been eating at lo these many years.

     His friends now long dead but not forgotten, he dines alone and peers deeply into his book for signs of life beyond his life, for indications of what will happen once he has become a mist over a tombstone.

     He eats quietly while noisy and harried fellow diners hassle over their individual lives and talk and signify among themselves.

     He turns another page in the musty volume and there lies, flatly pressed and nearly ossified, a long-stemmed green four-leaf clover. A symbol stuck there many decades back by someone who had feelings thoughts aspirations and longings, a person who believed if only for a moment that luck would somehow be mummified and preserved and passed on from reader to reader as long as the book lasted as long as the clover endured.

     He smiles to himself, for no one else is looking at him.

     He briefly picks up the botanical artifact and sniffs it, then carefully places it back onto the page and neatly turns the next page over it, being careful not to fold or harm it.

     He strolls back to his shop, a little less stooped so that nobody but he himself can tell, and he re-enters his quiet place of business and spends the afternoon dreaming of what never could have been and wondering what the young woman who had owned the book and the four-leaf clover had been like and whether she too was a mist over a tombstone awaiting contact with the mist he will become

© 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed