Hear today’s episode of Jim Reed’s Red Clay diary podcast:
or read his transcript below:
THE BIG FUNERAL HOME CHURCH FAN RECALL
My memory is subject to recall right now, ready for re-inspection and re-animation.
In just a jiffy I am back in childhood, sitting on a hardwood church pew, listening to a droning preacher, frantically breezing myself with the funeral-home cardboard fan in my small hand. These are the days before air conditioning.
With the non-fanning hand I dutifully open a dogeared hymnal and turn to a clergy-specified page. Adults around me begin intoning the first line of an old gospel song. Every individual in the church is singing in a different key, but the atonal chanting seems perfectly natural because the singers are so earnest and loud and impassioned.
Why do I pay so much attention to times long past, times like this? Why not just sink comfortably into today’s virtual world of image and rhetoric and feel-good self-absorption? I could be touching a screen and hearing the same song in-tune and perfect from a far-away choir.
I don’t have a good answer to that question. I just know that each and every fond memory, when re-examined, helps me catch on to things I missed the first time. Helps me realize how I got from way back then to just now. Helps me face the day refreshed, appreciative of what came before, bracing for what is to be.
So, in a new jiffy, I am once again way back in time, recalling life in a world that is smaller than the world is now, perhaps more important than the world is now.
This time, the church service is over, the funereal fan is placed on the pew, the congregation is quietly queueing toward the front door. The chief sermonizer is stationed there in order to shake each and every hand, including the hand of a small boy like me. Brother Nichols smiles warmly, looks me in the eye, tells me wordlessly that I am real and present and accounted for…sends me on my way feeling cared for.
I relish the times that grownups are simply complimentary and social. Much more than the times they are directive and instructive and punitive and disapproving.
To this day, whenever someone actually pays kindly attention to me, I get that same feeling, a feeling that people can do so much for each other whenever they pause a tiny moment to realize me, to acknowledge my worth. Even when I may not deserve it.
One more jiffy from the past: I’m heading for the family car in the church parking lot, anticipating freshly prepared Sunday dinner at home and playful competition among siblings for a drumstick and a slice of lemon meringue pie. Not only are these the days before air conditioning, these are the days before carry-out and take-home and pre-prepared meals.
Before long, we are safely home in our tiny dining room, laughing and gossiping and chatting, not at all aware of what air conditioning and perfect internet choirs and machine-packaged vittles will take away from us
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.