Hear Jim’s Red Clay diary: https://youtu.be/jLT44ssjn0Y

or read his transcript below:

DIGGING DEEP FOR THE PRIZE OF PRIZES

I’m five years old when I become aware that my right hand has become invisible.

Here I am, back in childhood’s Tuscaloosa, living high, enjoying playtime and neighborhood play pals and imaginary adventures. Unaware that someday all this playground fun will be camouflaged by the duties and expectations of adult life.

Right now, I am small and full of curiosity and energy. No responsibilities beyond household chores. No worries, because parents will take care of me, parents will shoulder all the pain and duty.

My right hand is stuck deep inside a box of Cracker Jacks, my fingers wiggling about. Impatient, I want to dig down for the prize that I know is hiding beneath all those caramelized popped kernels. The prize comes first. Then the appreciation and examination of the prize.

My right hand appears again when I pull it out of the box, prizeless and covered with sticky. Dang! I rotate the box and dig in again, stopping first to eat the best part of a Cracker Jack box, the crunchy peanut that occasionally makes an appearance.

My finger touches something hard and metallic. Prize found! Treasure discovered! What will it be?

I slowly pull forth the unknown object of my obsession, popcorn scattering about me.

It is a small metal airplane, complete with propellers you can spin, complete with the permanence that only cast iron can provide. This aircraft will last a lifetime or two!

I sit on the bottom step of the front porch gazing at the day’s Cracker Jack prize that is now perched on my bare knee. I clutch the box to my tiny chest and slowly savor the crunchy goodies within. I look for a second peanut. This is a good day.

Will there ever again be such a wonderful day?

My imagination extends as far as my right hand. This is the best day of my life so far

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Here Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/SDSC5j7glWI

or read the transcript below:

FROM GRUNTY TO NERDY AND BACK AGAIN

Sweeping up and straightening and cleaning.

Those are my summer tasks here at the Tuscaloosa YMCA in the late 1950s.

For this dusty work I receive a few dollars from the Y executive director.

With those few dollars I head for Lustig’s bookstore nearby and spend an hour roaming the aisles and inhaling the knowledge and humor and danger and romance dormant within multi-colored multi-shaped volumes.

These few days in the old Victorian house that shelters the Y provide my first experience in earning non-allowance non-school-lunch-money income. It is also a way to pay my way for an upcoming Hi-Y field trip.

As I walk home, saving bus money for more book purchases, pockets jingle with fresh income I can call my own. Previous entrepreneurial efforts have been terrifying and discouraging. Trying to sell greeting cards door to door is not for me. Who or what hides behind those doors I’m supposed to knock on? Cold calling , I learn, is way too scary to ever attempt again.

Next day after school, I cross fifteenth street and head for Parkview Drugs, where unspent lunch money and bus fare allow me to buy books from rotating squeaky metal racks. I will forever associate that sound with exciting literature and forbidden titles.

After the Y job, my working career lies fallow until the next summer, when I am employed as a day-laborer at a government housing construction project in Warrior, Alabama. Six weeks of sunburn and heat rash and heavy lifting bring me even more income. But those six weeks teach me that, like cold calling, grunt labor is not something that will ever satisfy me. I gain a new and unexpected education from co-workers. I learn a lot of cuss words and folklore, too. It is a vivid experience that still influences my writing and my journey through life.

The following summer brings me my bliss and sets my course.

At the age of seventeen I become an on-air personality at the public radio station in Tuscaloosa. More money, more jingle in my pockets, more books. Mainly, more experience that I, as a nerdy youngster, can appreciate and feel at home with. This later turns into a career in television.

There are other careers later on, but they turn out to be mistaken choices…until, one day, I begin to buy and sell old books for a living, writing a few books along the way. And, forty years later, I am still at it.

Many decades later, looking back with joy and horror at those and many other jobs, I can pick and choose…pick and choose which careers were ripe for me, right for me…which careers I should have avoided.

Should groundhog day ever occur, should I ever be allowed to do it all over again, I know exactly what I will pick this time as the best career of all best careers.

But that’s another story for another time

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Listen to Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary on youtube: https://youtu.be/SvXqgomWH88

or read the correct transcript below:

THE RANTS OF THE LANKY DEEP FROWN MAN

The mouth of the lanky Deep Frown Man is barely moving as his words issue forth from between clinched teeth. He’s pecking around within my bookshop, looking for things to rant about, his rantings deeply concretized and often repeated, rants he is clinging to in order to make some sense of his minuscule world.

My mind deflects the Deep Frown Man’s utterances, since I really do not know how to treat his pain.

He sends out probes to my blissful bubble, hoping to get a predictable response, a response that will allow him entry to my political depths, my tribal beliefs. He wants so much to show me how right he is and how wrong I am and how much of an ally I could become if only I would subscribe to his tract.

I quietly and rather merrily go about the business of assisting customers and shelving books, confident that this man will eventually leave and that peace will salve the atmosphere, and that nearby browsers can breathe a sign of relief and continue their gentle cruise.

The Deep Frown Man and others like him add an edge to the shop, but the fights they attempt to initiate are simply not there. It is not within me to punch back. It is not within me to counter his rants with facts or counterintelligence. Would not have any effect anyhow, don’t you know?

In a world of my own making, people like the Deep Frown Man would have a way to congregate and hear each other out. They would not have to go forth into the random world and try to force-feed folks who have no inclination to be force-fed.

Yes, I know that the Internet is the enormous palette upon which ranters can meet and greet…but this in no way affects the generation of Deep Frowners who have not embraced the Internet age, who don’t own a computer, who are not willing to learn more than they already know. So they are left to wander the earth, bringing their angry sadnesses to the rest of us through their non-virtual presence.

The Deep Frown People are fascinating, worth writing about, worthy of our examination in writings such as the one you are now reading.

I just wish they could find some peace and hope in listening to the rants of people who feel and believe differently. Wish they could embrace us, hear us out, allow us to hear them out minus the proselytizing, minus the intolerance they carry against anything opposed to their views.

Oh, well, I was raised to really look at people and try to appreciate the eternal children they carry inside themselves.

After all, what good is a day in which I, too, turn into a Deep Frown Man?

What good is any day if it is not predominantly a period of time in which I can seek to love unconditionally someone who is not at all lovable

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE