Monthly Archives: November 2025

RUMINATIONS OF A DOWN SOUTH RUMINATOR

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Hear Jim’s podcast at https://youtu.be/LtczGvPRDw0

or read the transcript below:

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Life, actually…

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RUMINATIONS OF A DOWN SOUTH RUMINATOR

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Whenever I begin writing a love letter to my people—the Down Southers who surround me—I go kind of blank.

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This could be because I’m trying too hard to be understandable.

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In this love letter to my people I want to be both specific and eloquent at the same time, so that my words will stay around for a while.  We writers live with this impossible hope, the hope that something profound will issue forth from our innards as we ply our trade.

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Of course, this does not happen frequently.

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So, why is writing a love letter so difficult?

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As inwardly-focused as we authors are, it is amazing we ever see anything objectively. The poetry of life, the adventure of life, can get in the way of specificity. We are stuck in our own dreams.

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So how do I get this letter written?

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An answer hurls itself at me in a rumpled note I just retrieved from the floor of my writing room. This note contains a quote by one of those long ago thinkers we might have heard of but of course never voluntarily study, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

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Now what in the world would someone like Rousseau, who lived several hundred years ago, have to say that in any way would apply to an obscure writer ensconced in the Deep South?

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Well, here is this guy’s quote that stays with me and propels me forward:

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“To write a love letter we must begin without knowing what we intend to say, and end without knowing what we have written.”

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That’s it. That’s the thought that taunts and instructs me.

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If I’m to write a love letter to the Down South people I’ve lived among these many decades, I have to stop ruminating, stop over-thinking, stop examining…I have to plunge into the task like any young’un who is confused and motivated by the passion of the moment.

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I have to write that letter full-blast, straight-forwardly, unapologetically, forgetting the rules of etiquette and grammar. What good is love if it has to be fussed over, gussied up, lipsticked beyond recognition, self-consciously faked?

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So, I’ll get started. I will write my love letter in a burst of passion and joy. I will put it aside unread until I can catch my breath.

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Then, as Miles Davis once said about his music, I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later

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© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed


THE VACANT THANKSGIVING CHAIR

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 Life, actually…

THE  VACANT THANKSGIVING DAY CHAIR

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Listen to Jim’s podcast:
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http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/thanksgivinghappiestsaddest.mp3

or

https://youtu.be/VcCpkjC-DyA

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or read on…

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Here is a true story I re-tell every Thanksgiving, just

to remind myself and you that everything that really

matters is right before us, all the time. Here ‘tis:

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THE VACANT THANKSGIVING CHAIR

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The saddest thing I ever saw: a small, well-dressed elderly woman dining alone at Morrison’s Cafeteria, on Thanksgiving Day.

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Oh there are many other sadnesses you can find if you look hard enough, in this variegated world of ours, but a diner alone on Thanksgiving Day makes you feel really fortunate, guilty, smug, relieved, tearful, grateful…it brings you up short and makes you time-travel to the pockets of joy and cheer you experienced in earlier days…

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Crepe paper. Lots of crepe paper. And construction paper. Bunches of different-colored construction paper.

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In my childhood home in Tuscaloosa, my Thanksgiving Mother always made sure we creative and restless kids had all the cardboard, scratch paper, partly-used tablets, corrugated surfaces, unused napkins, backs of cancelled checks, rough brown paper from disassembled grocery bags, backs of advertising letters and flyers…anything at all that we could use to make things. Yes, dear 21st-Century young’uns, we kids back then made things from scraps.

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We could cut up all we wanted, and cut up we did.

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We cut out rough rectangular sheets from stiff black wrapping paper and glued the edges together to make Pilgrim hats. Old belt buckles were tied to our shoelaces—we never could get it straight, whether the Pilgrims were Quakers, or vice versa, or neither. But it always seemed important to put buckles on our shoes and sandals, wear tubular hats and funny white paper collars, and craft weird-looking guns that flared out like trombones at one end.

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More fun than being a Pilgrim/Quaker was being an Indian—a true blue Native American, replete with bare chest, feathers shed by neighborhood doves, bows made of crooked twigs and kite string, arrows dulled at the tip by rubber stoppers and corks, and loads of Mother’s discarded rouge and powder and lipstick and mashed cranberries smeared here and there on face and body, to make us feel like the Indians we momentarily were.

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Sister Barbara and Mother would find some long autumnal-hued dresses for the occasion, but they were seldom seen outside the kitchen for hours on end, while the eight-course dinner was under construction.

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There was always an accordion-fold crepe paper turkey centerpiece on display, hastily bought on sale at S.H. Kress, just after last year’s Thanksgiving season. It looked nothing like my Aunt Mattie’s turkeys in her West Blocton front yard.

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And for some reason, we ate cranberry products on that day and that day only. Nobody ever thought about cranberries the other 364 days! And those lucky turkeys were lucky because nobody ever thought of eating them except at Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were home free the rest of the year!

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Now, back into the time machine of just a few years ago.

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It is Thanksgiving Day. My wife and son and granddaughter are all out of the country. Other family and relatives are either dead or gone, or just plain tied up with their own lives elsewhere, doing things other than having Thanksgiving Dinner with me.

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My brother, Tim, my friends Tim Baer and Don Henderson and I decide that we will have to spend Thanksgiving Dinner together, since each of us is bereft of wife or playmate or relative, this particular holiday this particular year.

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So, we wind up at Morrison’s Cafeteria, eating alone together, going through the line and picking out steamed-particle-board turkey, canned cranberries, thin gravy, boxed mashed potatoes and some bakery goods whose source cannot easily be determined.

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But we laugh at our situation and each other, tell jokes, cut up a bit, and thank our lucky stars that this one Thanksgiving Dinner is surely just a fluke.

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We’ll be trying that much harder, next year, to not get blind-sided by the best holiday of the year, Thanksgiving being the only holiday you don’t have to give gifts or reciprocate gifts or strain to find the correct gifts.

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 Left to right: Tim Reed, Tim Baer, Jim Reed lining up for Thanksgiving.

Don Henderson is behind the camera.

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On Thanksgiving holidays ever since, I make sure I’m with family and friends, and now and then I try to set a place at the table of my mind, for any elderly lady or lone friend who might want to join us…for the second saddest thing I’ve ever seen is a happy family lustily enjoying a Thanksgiving feast together and forgetting for a moment about all those lone diners in all the cafeterias of the world who could use a kind glance and a smile

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© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed

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https://youtu.be/xDLnyTrOchc

SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE WILD BLUE YONDER

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Life, actually…

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SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE WILD BLUE YONDER

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The planet-sized eyedrop is on its way from squeezed-rubber tube to human eyeball (mine).

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It isn’t always the size of my field of vision. It starts out as a small droplet, then gravity drops it through six inches of humid space all the way into my in-between blinks. By the time it splashes, by the time I involuntarily blink, this space traveler has done its duty. It is bigger than the universe, then disappears into my innards, then helps heal my momentary affliction. Then is no more.

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During the time I am this little kid lying abed, I receive many nurturing gifts not of my own choosing. These many years ago I simply go with the flow. Grownups manage my well-being, my health, my energy. From all this attention comes the free time needed to grow and develop, to become who I am, to become who I will be should all go well.

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Now, at the over-ripened age of eight score-plus, I feel the effect of those eyedropper years. I see how a thousand fold acts of kindness thrust me gently into the future I now inhabit.

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All those implements my elders employed to keep me viable were important, more instrumental in enabling my good and future life than I ever realized.

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The objects that kept me going were all larger than life when I was a tad: planet-sized wash cloths, diapers, syringes, thermometers, towels, bandages, ointments, unguents, sanitizers, protective clothing, clippers, shampoos, soaps, braces, crutches, supports, vitamins, polishes, buffers, tweezers, magnifiers…

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And, most importantly, planet-sized loving hands were always present to administer these tools.

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I think about all the dedication and drive it took for parents and family and friends and professionals to keep me going. They patched me up, encouraged me, pointed out the good opportunities, warned me of the bad, took me in when I became disoriented or sad. Cared for me without condition.

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Did I thank them enough? Did I fail to thank many others? Will I ever be able to reward these interplanetary-sized good-hearted Good Samaritans? No way.

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All I can do is become the Samaritan of Right Now. I can pay it forward by closely attending to those who need me, even to those who don’t know they need me.

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The kindest thing I can do is silently and invisibly lend a giant hand where needed. The most unselfish thing I can do is quietly help someone, then quietly fade away.

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Only then can I breathe easily, smile at life, watch out for potholes

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Jim Reed © 2025 A.D.

MY ANTEBELLUM CHRISTMAS PRESENT

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Life, actually…

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 MY ANTEBELLUM CHRISTMAS PRESENT

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https://youtu.be/TamF9KovbqI

(Read text below and/or listen by clicking above.)

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Every trip to the old antebellum house was like Christmas Morning.

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Whenever I could get there, by way of bus or foot or bicycle or ride-hitching, I felt like Christmas had just gotten jump-started.

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The antebellum home in Downtown Tuscaloosa, back in the 1950’s, had expelled its original dwellers and converted itself into the County Library.

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It seemed to exist solely for my pleasure.

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Up the stairs, not racing, in slow motion—don’t want to incur the wrath of a shushing librarian—I head for bookcases containing the knowledge of the known world and the imagined knowledge of undiscovered worlds.

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Opening each book was like unwrapping a Christmas gift.

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Each volume contained its own peculiarities. In addition to the printed words within, there were always imagination-laden surprises:

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A pressed flower might drop spinning to the floor.

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A scrap of paper complete with cryptic message would unfold itself and read its contents to me.

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A margin scribble or an underline would challenge me to guess what a previous reader’s life was like.

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Mustard stains might tattle-tale whether the patron read at night or on the run at a hot dog stand.

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Unmistakable tobacco fragrances absorbed by the paper would be identified by brand-name (Cherry Blend was popular).

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Little crayoned bookmarks and turned-down corners made certain pages more intriguing.

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Coffee rings exposed the previous reader’s carelessness.

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Librarian mutilations included penciled numbers and rubber stamps and glued pockets and dog eared dated cards and taped-down dust jackets and intrusive binding materials and repaired/reinforced spines.

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The heft and texture and color and fragrance and flaws of the physical book were more fascinating than the book itself, at times.

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The powerful shower of Holmesian clues would almost make reading the book an anticlimactic exercise.

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To this day, I prefer the flawed personality of a well-used book to the pristine untouched edition that nobody ever opened.

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Every book has its own history, my dear Watson. I can tell you a lot about what that book has been through just from all the clues and hints of clues that warp it and give it character.

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Visit my antebellum shop in the Center of the Universe, Birmingham, Alabama and commence your sleuthing

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Jim Reed © 2025 A.D.

GRANDMOTHERLY ADVICE TO A FORLORN MEMORY RETRIEVER

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Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary 4-minute podcast: https://youtu.be/_JuTgDw1GDg

or read the manuscript below:

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Life, actually…

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GRANDMOTHERLY ADVICE TO A FORLORN MEMORY RETRIEVER 

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“Be a good boy. Always do the right thing. Do not waiver from the true path.”

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This is the kind of advice my grandmother gladly and generously dispensed whenever I would listen. It was good advice. Commonsense advice. Grand Vizier-level advice.

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It was the kind of advice that any wise village elder possesses, even to this day.

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The only problem is, my grandmother and her generation seldom got to lay out their truths and wisdoms to upcoming generations. Nobody got to converse one-on-one with elders. Life is distracting and noisy. Distractions and noise gain much more attention than quietly spoken tutorials about love and generosity and behavior and kindness.

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My grandmother was venerated. We loved her. We simply did know that our inexperienced language and her seasoned language could get together and share things, things that might make life more understandable, more tolerable.

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She was of her generation, we were of ours. We did not know the language of acceptance and diplomacy.

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I wish I had known all this as a child. Maybe I could have skipped some of the more difficult episodes that deflected my growth as a mature adult.

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I am now ready to listen, Granny. But you are not here to share time with me.

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But wait—there’s more.

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Truth be known, I can share wisdoms with my grandmother. All it takes is a deep breath or two, a few furlongs of memory retrieval, the willingness to pay close attention to every single memory and impression of Granny that I ever had.

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Granny can talk with me because I know what she would say in so many words if she were here, today.

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Having birthed eight kids, she would help me understand how to navigate childrearing. She would point out the potholes and show me how to heal or correct a boo-boo. “Here’s an example of how I did this,” she would say. I would listen and observe.

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“Here’s how I dealt with a bully in my day. Listen and learn.”

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Yes, children of the Down South soil, there have always been bullies about, and there have always been people who knew how to quell the behavior of bullies. I know how Granny’s generation did it. I just had not realized that she, being of that generation, knew the knowable—the things more people of solid upbringing learn from experience, learn from observing their own elders.

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To spank or not to spank? Granny knew what grannies know, that setting solid and loving boundaries—and enforcing them—gets you through hard moments, no spanking necessary.

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Got it?

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You can list your own wisdoms and observations, things that your elders have outlined and demonstrated to you silently, no one-on-one deep chats needed.

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Go back and examine your memories. Pay attention to lessons that were clearly on display, lessons you and I ignored at the time because we thought we knew better.

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Now, at our present age, we at last know that we did not know what we needed to know. Our wild inexperienced ideas and notions were simply that. We guessed at things based on gut and fear and unfiltered reaction, but we did not yet have experience on our side.

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We now know that we never did know everything we needed to know. We now know that in order to know that which is worth knowing, we actually need to admit we don’t know, we have to admit that it is time to tune in to those who loved us and are still waiting patiently to help us out

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© Jim Reed 2025 A.D.