Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/discoveringandabandoningthecathedralofbooks.mp3

or read his tale below:

DISCOVERING AND ABANDONING THE CATHEDRAL OF BOOKS

 Diving headlong into the pages of my lifelong Red Clay Diary, I find these notes.

They are both actual and true:

The spindly used and tape-repaired thin-wheeled bicycle is my rocket machine to all parts of the city of Tuscaloosa in the 1950′s. I can hop on that black spider vehicle and escape Eastwood Avenue, Northington Campus and all points east, and ride westward down the breeze toward Downtown and freedom for a few hours.

I yank the front of the bike up to climb curbs, skid parallel to railroad tracks, nearly lose control, then cross several more tracks diagonally to get to the main street of Tuscaloosa.

First stop is the Cathedral of Books, the Tuscaloosa County Library, where the 19th-century Friedman home houses all there is of a public library for the town. Climbing the stairs is like ascending the steps of a Mayan pyramid, for from the top, I can turn and survey passing traffic and pedestrians in the sure knowledge that wherever they are headed, it cannot possibly be as exciting as where I am going. Poor peasants!

Inside the library, it is quiet and creaky, and the odor of musty books is everywhere. Rubberstamped tramping upon library file cards is about the loudest noise. I can spend all the time I want, running my fingers over the spine titles, trying ever so hard to decide what I can actually read by book-return time. How will I ever possibly get to read all those books, go to all those special places that the poor deprived pedestrians and motorists outside cannot even imagine?

I head for the science section, reading all the astronomy and simplified physics books I get my hands on, books by Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell, George Gamow, Isaac Asimov…then go for the adult fiction area and pick out the authors I have already fallen in love with: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Max Shulman, Thorne Smith–authors who aren’t really writing fiction at all–they are writing about what I know now, what I know might happen, what I hope won’t happen, what I pray will happen. 

Then, poetry, making friends with Robert Frost and Sara Teasdale and Carl Sandburg and James Whitcomb Riley. And on to theatre scripts, plays by Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams…

And then, science fiction! Ray Bradbury and his followers, Arthur C. Clarke, Shirley Jackson, Robert Heinlein, Fredric Brown…and Ray Bradbury again. After reading every science fiction book in the library, I find I need more. Is this all there is? Are there no other books in the universe?

Scouring the shelves each time I go to the Cathedral of Books, I finally realize I have read everything I’ll ever want to read of what is here. The librarians are of no help–they can’t understand my passion for more, because I don’t know how to tell them what more is.

So, I finally stop visiting the Tuscaloosa County Library.

For two reasons, actually. I have read everything I care to read there. But primarily, I do not want to return the books I read. It is very difficult to tumble headlong into a book, fall in love with it, live it, then have to return it to the care of impersonal strangers. The book is my adopted child. How can I return a child? Once born into my hands, once borne by my hands, the child is my responsibility.

The solution comes soon enough, out of sheer desperation. I discover the secret of Lunch Money! Mother gives me lunch money each day, so that I can eat heavy chewy buns and glug pasteurized homogenized Perry’s Pride milk and scarf macaroni and cheese in the Tuscaloosa High School lunchroom. None of this tastes as good as words, written words. It doesn’t take long to realize, with a stretch of ethics and logic, that Mother’s lunch money is a gift to me to do with as I please. I don’t really have to eat! This will leave me with enough money to buy a book or two a day.

So, the Cathedral of Books transplants itself to the Drug Store and the Dime Store, where 25-cent paperback books are available by the hundreds.

At Parkview Drugs in the Parkview Shopping Center across the street from school, I walk my fingers through the racks of randomly un-arranged paperback books–some costing as much as 35 cents!–and select the day’s readings. To heck with milk and bread. Man–er, teen-age boys– cannot live by milk and bread alone, much less government-surplus macaroni and cheese!

The great thing about the paperback book racks is, there’s only one title of each book at any one time, and they are never alphabetized or arranged by subject, as they are at the library. Therefore, I have to go through each and every book, one by one, reading the short blurbs on the front cover and the longer blurbs on the back, then the come-on blurb on the front first page, to find out what each book is about. This means I am exposed to many, many subjects and authors I would never have known about at the Library. I have to learn a little of everything to find out anything!

I buy books I’ve never heard about because of those blurbs–and mainly because of the lurid covers each title sports. Illustrators are assigned the task of making the customer want to purchase the book, so even the most serious titles display scantily dressed women and action-packed scenes that often are not even found inside the books. But it works! I read widely and eclectically because of those lurid pictures and come-on blurbs.

I feel quite sorry for anybody who doesn’t know the joy of randomly browsing through hundreds of subjects and titles, learning more and being exposed to more than teachers can possibly imagine or control. 

My self-education is a joy and a spine-tingling challenge. I must sacrifice something to get what I want–lunch, for instance–when I have to peddle all the way downtown on a spindly second-hand bicycle to grab that new book off the rack and rush my quarter to the checkout counter before anybody else can snatch it ahead of me.

Drugstores also have enormous magazine racks that display every kind of subject–Scientific American sits next to the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. Mad Magazine can be picked up along with Sky and Telescope and Popular Mechanics. I even read the self-grooming ads! I give up my hair tonic money and my acne medicine money for more and better books, which might explain why studious kids like me are always depicted as being pimply, bespectacled and unkempt. We are.

No matter. I get what I want, and I don’t hurt anybody in the long run. I believe my Mother forgives me, too, for she knows that words give me more pleasure than food and grooming. Of course, if I go too long without using soap, she will draw the line.

To this day, every time I pass through a small town and see an old Victorian House that’s been converted into a library or a bookstore, I have to stop in to see what’s what. Each time one of those little towns has an old drugstore, I go in to explore what’s left of the paperback books and magazines.

And I still find, now and then, something well worth reading that I do not know exists until just this moment, waiting on the rack for me and me alone

© Jim Reed 2025 A.D.

Life, actually…

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WEAPONS OF PEACE

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I do not want to get all corny right now, but in times like these there must be room for occasionally peaceful thoughts. Or healing thoughts. Or kindly wisdoms.

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Since I do not see myself as having consistently profound ideas, today I am relying on words of wisdom from other folks.

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Even if you only have one profound thought within your lifetime, it deserves to be held up for all to see. Some of us do need to imagine sweet notions of what life on a peaceful planet might be like.

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So, here are a few quotes that occasionally give me a moment of hope. Pick those you like and cling to them until the current Troubles have passed.

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“May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.”
–The Upanishads

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“We are Love We are One We are how we treat each other when the day is done. We are Peace We are War We are how we treat each other and Nothing More.”
–Alternate Routes

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“What Carl Sagan envisioned we could become: Conscious, wise, compassionate, energetically curious, eternally skeptical, immune to the manipulations and intimidations of the powerful, free of the walls that imprison and divide us; awe-inspired by the beauty of an ever-broadening identification horizon, welcoming of its expansion; no longer stunted by the old primate hierarchies, but instead, proud of our capacity to care for each other and to discern our tiny, utterly decentralized place in the fabric of nature, space and time; secure enough at last to embrace the wonder inherent in this reality, awakened to our responsibilities as a link in the generations past and future, at peace with our self-knowledge, alert to a heightened and consequential sense of the sacred; long-term thinkers, solid citizens of the planet and the cosmos; as Carl was; fully alive, completely connected.”
–Ann Druyan

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“Why should we not all live in peace and harmony? We look up at the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be only one road leading to an answer.”
–Quintus Aurelius Symmachus

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“Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.”
–Katharine Hepburn

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“Being kind and loving and caring really matters. The truths constantly change and disguise themselves, but being kind and loving and caring always counts.”
–Jim Reed

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“The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don’t dare to assert themselves.”
–Mark Twain

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“The height of human wisdom is to bring our tempers down to our circumstances and to make a calm within, under the weight of the greatest storm without.”
–Daniel Defoe

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“If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”
—Bob Hope

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“I needed some quiet time so I listened to a recording of my favorite mime songs.”
–Jim Reed

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That’s enough for today. Pick at these words and embrace the ones that seem to matter.

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Then, come up with your own thoughts about how to endure bad times, how to perpetuate good times, how to post loving and kindhearted ideas so that those who journey with you will be inspired to do better

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© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed

Catch Jim’s 4-minute podcast: https://youtu.be/4EVacnUt8m4

or read his story below:

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Life, actually…

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I HAVE A DREAM. OR TWO.

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I hope you will forgive me my vanity, my self-absorption, for two minutes. I want to share two dreams with you. They may have deep meaning, they may be interesting but meaningless. You and I can determine that. Here they are:

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DREAM ONE: I’m in my childhood Down South home. My sister Barbara is here with me in the living room.

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This dream is in color, unlike many of my dreams.

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Outside, the sun is reflected in bright green hues off a row of large trees just across the street. The trees are waving and swaying under a strong breeze. They are not the trees I was brought up seeing. They are taller and more lush and most graceful in their rippling movements.

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The living room is a combination of the way it looked when I was a child—hardwood floors and pastel walls—and the way it was up till the day Mother died—some antiques and more family memorabilia lying around.

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Barbara is talking with me about something, but I’m beginning to ignore her because I can now hear my mother’s voice as if she is still alive. I can’t make out the words, but her musical voice is definitely in the room with us.

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Then, I see my mother.

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She is sitting on a hassock or footstool in the living room. I quickly hug her, enfolding her entire body in my arms, hoping to make sure she doesn’t get away from me this time. She is warm and small and self-contained and does not respond to the hug, nor does she pull away.

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She is saying something again, and what she is saying is incomprehensible, but I can tell from the way it feels that she is in another place away from all of us, a place where she can deal with her own singular universe without having to be concerned for what’s happening on our block, in our world, in our family. She feels very real while I am hugging her, and then she is gone, as is the dream.

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I wake up, staring at the wall, not daring to move, hoping the dream hasn’t gone but knowing that it will never happen again. This is the last communique from Mother.

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THE FINAL DREAM:  Soon after my father died, I saw him twice before he went away for good. Walking into the den of my parents’ home, I saw—out of the corner of my eye—my father, sitting in his easy chair, staring serenely into space, self-contained and comfortable with himself. When I looked directly at the chair, he wasn’t there.

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A few days later, I dreamed that our wall held a large portrait of my father as he looked when young. He was hatless and wearing a three-piece dress suit. He stared directly at the room from within the portrait and his lips began to move. I could not tell what he was saying, but again I had the feeling he was letting me know he was all right, that things would go on without him but that he, too, would go on without us. He was in good shape, he was trying to tell me.

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So, the parents are gone for good. I am here and they are there. This doesn’t seem to matter now, not to me, anyhow. I have this feeling we’ll not need each other again, nor will we ever see each other again—not here nor in the afterlife.

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We’re all going our separate ways and the cosmos is too large for us to ever find one another. Instead, we’ll each go to our respective niches on our own tracks and continue to participate in nature as tiny atoms dispersing dispersing dispersing but never stopping.

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Thanks for sharing with me these short minutes. You may now resume control of your beautiful life

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 © 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed

Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary at https://youtu.be/ejT7MGS8Fvs

or read his transcript below:

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Life, actually…

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MADE WITH REAL INGREDIENTS

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Way back home during way-back times Down South, our little close-knit family occupied the time we had by piddling around with words and phrases and imaginings and ideas and spontaneous improvisations.

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This was before Television, before the Internet, before ear pods, before video games, before cell phones and smart phones.

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Yes, my childhood took place way before any of these wonderfully frightening inventions took over our lives.

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So, what did we, the Reed Family, do to entertain ourselves? We had books and board games and jigsaw puzzles and anthills and crossword puzzles and coloring books and model-airplane kits and magic sets and toys that required our devotion—we assembled things and glued things and painted things and created makeshift tree houses and re-purposed so many objects. A discarded umbrella, held high on a breezy day, could transport a roller-skater an entire village block. Two fists clasped just-so together would become a puffed-cheeks doomsday trumpet for backyard battles. A worn-through blanket could turn into a superhero cape. A painted high heel became Cinderella’s long-lost slipper.

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And because we had never heard of all those new-fangled inventions to come, we were perfectly happy with what we could discover. Everything became a burst of imaginary possibilities.

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All this might explain why I still read fortune cookies, why I look for the daily quote in a newspaper, why I cherish every short anecdote that reveals something delightful about humans and the nature of humans, why I take notes. All this might explain why ponies are still findable in our scattered and checkered world.

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MADE WITH REAL INGREDIENTS is a bold and enthusiastic statement printed on a package of edibles I just opened. Yes, I still read cereal boxes and candy wrappers and creepy instructions. Yes, I still get some pleasure and puzzlement out of disjointed statements such as THIS FILM CONTAINS ADULT CONTENT. This basically says the movie contains content. Wouldn’t we all assume this…or can content contain content? Some things are worthy of consideration, some are worthy of a good laugh and a nearby trash can.

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I wonder whether I’ll ever see a package that states MADE WITH UNREAL INGREDIENTS.

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I wonder whether I can prove that I am made with real ingredients.

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Is this an unreal expectation on my part?

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Don’t bother answering. I’m busy trimming down a Quaker Oats box to form a trading-card-size image to slip into the bubblegum card display at the shop.

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Can’t wait to watch the browser’s reaction

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© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed