Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/
or read his transcript below:
The time of corona allows me a moment to dig deep into
old Red Clay Diary entries. Time to recall days and moments so beautiful.
Too beautiful to store away and forget.
So, here’s a fond memory from eons ago when Deep South
villagers clustered for an hour of a Sunday afternoon to hear sweet music.
ALL THAT JAZZ
Outside the large old windows of the large old church, the bright sunshine tries hard to get through the glass and closer to the sounds of jazz, sounds that gently stroke the ceiling the floor the pews the people and the sunbeams themselves with variations on a theme of love thy everything, love thy everyone.
The pews get harder the longer we sit but the music gets lovelier and the lazy afternoon will not loosen its hold on us.
In the pew behind us an infant snores peacefully against its mother’s breast. In front of us a little girl is so caught up in the music that her body vibrates with every chord. She plays among the sunbeams and the old dust and the almost visible musical notes. She is inside the music just as surely as the baby is inside his dreams, inside his mother’s arms.
We sit in this hard pew between this infant and this child and feel the music so intimately that it seems to be pulling our bliss into one organic joy, even though we sit still and polite and quiet.
Jazz variations on the lightness of being.
And the thing is, this baby and this little girl cannot decipher the meaning of all this joy.
And you know it really doesn’t matter, because their purity is so resounding in the Sunday afternoon dust
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.