Listen to Jim’s Red Clay Diary on youtube: https://youtu.be/asapImi3m5U
or read his transcript below:
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I had time to be a teeny, time to experience the passages of youth. SCENES FROM A MEANDERING TEENHOOD…
SOMETIMES THE ECHO ANSWERS BACK
My imaginary flying carpet carries me beyond hither, way past yon. I am having great fun until I have to pull up to a gas station to re-fuel. Did Aladdin have to do this?
Floating in outer space, awaiting free fall, I suddenly realize that I need to go to the bathroom.
I spend weeks flirting with a coed in English class. My teen longing produces zero effect until, one day, the English coed responds and indicates she would be willing to go out with me. Suddenly, I realize that I do not have a car or a driver’s license. What was I thinking?
I’m standing atop a great pile of abandoned strip mine dirt. I look across the green water below and see another pile. Maybe I can yell and create an echo. I call out, “HaaaaaaaThere!” The echo hollers back, “So whattayou want with me already?” I skedaddle and never tell anyone else what just happened. Later, I wonder where my “HaaaaaaaThere!” went off to. Is it still circling the globe?
My teen buddies, Dot and Jim, are joining me in wading across Hurricane Creek, heading toward a little island. Suddenly, Dot jumps a couple of feet in the air and climbs aboard my back. I follow her gaze and see a large rattlesnake lazing in the sun, slowly aroused. The three of us skedaddle. Lots of skedaddling occurs when you’re a kid.
My father takes brother Ronny and me hunting in a forest. Ronny has a rusty .22 rifle and I tote the double-barreled shotgun I’ve been gifted as part of a rite of passage. Dad fires his weapon at a high-up dancing squirrel. I don’t want to kill anything or anybody. To divert attention from my wimpyness I fire both barrels at the squirrel’s tree and hope I don’t hit anything. I still have that shotgun these generations later, but I’ve never fired it since. I believe the squirrel survived and is still dancing.
My playmate Jimmy and his kid brother are excited and frightened, and a bit nervous. They just observed several UFOs in a vacant lot near their house. I am a total skeptic, meaning I want more data. Jimmy describes in great detail what the flying saucers were doing, what they looked like. He even diagrams them. He really saw them. Again, as a skeptic, I am still awaiting the verdict, even though my own brother, Tim, also had a UFO experience years later. I secretly doubt that intelligent space aliens would ever bother to visit such a flawed species as Earthlings.
My best friend since second grade, Pat, tries an ESP experiment with me one evening at her home. We sit and focus and sort of meditate, then she asks me to guess what she is imagining—a number between one and 100. For some mysterious reason, I suddenly envision a large three-dimensional number 17 emanating from her forehead and gliding through the air toward me. It is the exact number she has written down. Like the UFO experiences, this has never happened again. We could not replicate the experiment. Being fairly smart, we did not obsess about it and went on to other activities. But isn’t that interesting?
One night, walking alone with nothing to do, I gaze up at the top of a very tall smokestack on the campus of an abandoned military base called Northington. Something comes over me. Since no-one is looking at or judging me, I decide to climb that smokestack, just to test my own courage. I grab a rusty iron rung and begin the ascent, not daring to look down. When I get about ten feet up, I figure maybe I’d better descend. Descending turns out to be more difficult than I imagine, because it involves looking down. What the heck, I tell myself. I’m already this high up. Might as well go for it. The smokestack gets taller as I climb, some of the rungs are rusty and slightly loose. But I gotta do it because I’m a teen and this is one of the insane things teens do. I finally make it to the top, gaze down the large dark hole, imagine myself becoming stuck there and being found as a skeleton years later. The rest of the story does go on. Let’s just say I finally made it safely to the ground and vowed never to do anything this stupid again. And if I have done stupid things since then, I’ll not reveal them to you.
Just a few scenes from my childhood. If you don’t like these, I have others.
Why not share your own scenes with me
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.