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.