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Life, actually…

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TRAWLING FOR DEEP-SOUTH DOPPELGANGERS

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I am playing hide-and-seek today, trawling a flea mall for obscure books to adopt in order to surprise my bookshop customers.

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The thrill of the search distracts me from the unsolvable challenges of daily life.

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The market’s scattered browsers are all looking for their special interests, their fond memories. Me, I look for books and their buddies—documents, periodicals, maps, globes and the like.

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Some books hide themselves in undusted stacks. Some call out to me, others cringe and keep silent.

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Anyhow, I am having fun seeking and adopting these paginated orphans. I  clean them up, inspect and shelve them, pass them on to proper foster homes.

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“Oh, look, Granddaddy used to have one of these in his store,” a musical voice chimes from one of the dealer cubicles.

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It is the voice of my sister. But I don’t see my sister anywhere nearby. I stop to listen and verify.

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“Oh, I had one of these in the third grade,” sister Barbara’s light chuckle accompanies her observation.

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Damn, it really is my sister. What is she doing in this flea bitten place? She lives far away and seldom drives long distances alone.

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Still can’t find her, though I am peeking around corners and through antique displays to see whether I can sneak up on her.

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Her pleasant patter continues but seems to move away from me as fast as I stalk her.

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That laughing voice again.

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I forget about books and strive to see her close up and in person.

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I spot the source of her laughter. A woman her size and shape has her back to me. She is with someone I don’t know. I freeze in place.

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What if she is secretly visiting an old friend and doesn’t wish to be discovered by her baby brother? Is this a relative? A covert lover? Is she living more than one life?

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Finally, my mind stops racing when I see her face. It’s not Barbara. It is merely someone who is identical to her, someone whose DNA has perhaps by chance turned up in a stranger she’ll never meet.

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No use going up to this person to share anecdotes about coincidence and lineage. She just might think I’m a weird little old man seeking conversation. Which I am.

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I slink away to another part of the mall and resume trawling for books, my net cast wide.

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But now and then I hear Barbara’s voice. Now and then I recall the wondrous lives we have led. Now and then I need to hear her voice.

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Guess I’ll give her a call tonight

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© 2022 A.D. Jim Reed

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Life, actually…

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NEVER HAD ONE LESSON

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WHOOOO…WHOOO…

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The Birmingham-to-Tuscaloosa-to-New Orleans train whistle brings me out of a sweet 4 am dream. A dream in which I am Gene Kelly cruising effortlessly through drenching rain, not giving a dang about the discomfort of clinging wet clothing and squishy hard soled shoes. Gene Kelly, singing and smiling in perpetuity, his feet barely touching down as he floats, in love and in life.

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Someone asked me the other day, what my greatest wish is. I immediately said, “I would like to be Gene Kelly for just three minutes, just to see what it’s like to draw people out of their troubles and into a few moments of hope.”

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There, I said it. Wouldn’t it be nice to move like Gene Kelly?

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To dream the impossible dream.

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It looks so easy, doesn’t it?

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Fred Astaire once said, ”I just put my feet in the air and move them around.”

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That’s the secret. Fred and Gene want us to suspend disbelief for a moment and make us think it’s that easy to be elegant and inspiring.

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Maybe it is.

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The magician who wows me with unexpected trickery, the trapeze artist who makes me think for an instant, “Why, I could do that!”, the actor who causes me to laugh despite my comfortable gloominess, the self-confident police officer who waves me past without giving me a ticket, the caregiver who smiles while tending to a helpless patient,  the calming grandfather who transforms a child’s tears into laughter.

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These people are helpers, helping me to embrace, rather than contest, the time I have.

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We are all performers setting examples, whether we know it or not.

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Like most achievements in life, it might take years to perfect the gracefulness it takes to donate a transformative moment, a moment that someone might need desperately.

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I have many choices each day, but I feel best about myself and the world when I choose to help uplift hope rather than perpetuate fear.

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It can be as simple an act as watching Ferris Bueller playing his clarinet with horrifyingly tuneless results. The joy comes from his earnestness. He thinks he’s making beautiful music. He proudly looks straight at me and says, “Never had one lesson!” and continues his performance.

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I giggle each time this scene repeats itself. It proves that very often a giggle is exactly what is required to take seriously the next important moment of life.

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And imagining myself to be Gene Kelly for three minutes never seems to be a waste of time

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 © 2022 A.D. Jim Reed

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Life, actually…

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DEEP SOUTH AIRPORT WAITING LOT

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I’m marking time in this Deep South village airport cellphone lot.

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This array of idling vehicles constitutes a sub-village of sorts. A place of temporary inhabitants.

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Those of us who are sitting and waiting do not rent space here. We just occupy space. We scratch our phone screens. We allow ear pods to overwhelm and expurgate our thoughts. We fidget. We await the call.

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The call will let us know whether there are delayed or on-time or early arrivals. The call will let us know that the arrivers have descended safely.

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The call will free us up to focus on the next challenge, then the next.

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There is little to do but stare forth through the windshield and note our surroundings. Green hills and one-way arrows and don’t-you-dare-park-here signs. A lone grey trash receptacle and several metallic light poles and some landscaped trees.

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And people. There are people. Nestled all snug in their bubbles. Linked but oblivious of their links.

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ACs and motors hum and grumble, closed windows and locked doors replace would-be side-by-side conversations between waiting-room strangers.

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We only guess at what lies racing through each others’ minds.

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Evidence of lives being lived abound. Car tags display coded and numbered and lettered mysteries. Stickers and slogans and keyed scratches and red mud and hitches hold clues.

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Other hard-to-read-in-the-dark signs and notices tell us we had better do something or not-do-something or face the unknown consequences. A chain link fence enslaves tall ungroomed weeds.

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Fifty shades of gray clouds loll about in the dark, layered skies. Aircraft materialize and descend and ascend. Remnants of once-present objects stand purposeless.

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The ring. The voice on the phone cheerfully announces a soft landing. Onward to luggage retrieval and loved-ones reception

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Soon the second act commences. Now, breathing resumes

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© 2022 A.D. Jim Reed

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Life, actually…

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This happened long ago. But then, didn’t just about everything?

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COLD CASE GHOST RIDERS

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 What if the creator of the universe got claustrophobia and suddenly and inexplicably the universe simply wasn’t roomy enough?

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And what if said creator at once realized that by its very definition the universe was everything it could ever be and as big as it could ever get?

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And what if the creator had to really start thinking about whether infinite power and wisdom were infinite and powerful only within the universe’s own boundaries and rules?

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That’s the kind of thinking you do when you are hermetically sealed inside a cold case. A cold case containing you alone.

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A windowless unfriendly metallic air-conditioned coffin, a coffin so snug that your arms folded across your chest press against the sides of the coffin and allow you no wiggle room.

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The faceless people who placed you inside this cold and dry coffin have warned you not to move a muscle because if you move a muscle you must stay inside the coffin twice as long.

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Twice as long as eternity is about as perplexing as the idea of a creator getting claustrophobia and not being able to do anything about it without breaking finely tailored rules.

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In order to survive this icy coffin for eternity you have to figure out what to do with your mind because it is your mind that won’t leave you alone, it is your mind that keeps reminding you that you are unique among heavy-breathing animals only because you can imagine what is not and can rethink your own death a thousand times a minute before it ever occurs, thus making your own death potentially anti-climactic because of all that dress-rehearsing your mind has been doing for so long.

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And even that isn’t true because you somehow know that no matter how many times you die before dying you’ll find death as fresh and as annoying and as terrifying when it finally comes as it has been all those years you have been rehearsing for it.

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So you try to use your pesky brain against itself—that is, you try to get it to think about pleasant things you dream up, since your mind insists on thinking nonstop anyhow.

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For at least for 90 seconds you get some relief because you call up the anecdote your big sister related to you just the day before all this started happening.

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Sister Barbara was lying there some months back just like you are now, inside an air-conditioned coffin hermetically sealed against the staff members of the medical facility who were drinking paper-cupped Cokes and staring right through you when you walked toward the coffin just a while ago.

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In the city where she was receiving her MRI she was at least offered something I was not offered. She could have any kind of music she wanted to hear piped into the coffin as she lay there for a small eternity.

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She elected “her kind” of music and lo and behold, just as she was preparing herself for the thousand deaths of isolation, just as she was trying to adjust to the idea of being cut off from her entire outside life, the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky” started playing and she started giggling and a stern disembodied voice told her through a cold speaker that she must try to contain herself.

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But she got through the experience.

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I could only pretend I was hearing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” since the people outside my particular coffin were making no noise at all and here I was with no ghost riders and trying mightily not to cough for fear of being punished with a longer stay inside the coldest case I’ve never imagined.

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And you know, I was kind of beginning to identify with a claustrophobic creator who just got too big for the universe…or did the universe get too small?

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The ending of this story is kind of pathetic since I never did get out of that coffin and the only comfort I have received from that experience is the knowledge that creators, too, can be trapped forever in a universe too small to contain all the kindnesses we can imagine, too small because in between the kindnesses is the detritus of the universe, the bad stuff.

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I just disregard the idea that all those left-over ghost riders are floating out there between the kindnesses.

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All this is just fine, so long as the kindnesses distract us from that other stuff

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© 2022 A.D. Jim Reed

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