Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://jimreedbooks.com/podcast/
or read the transcript below:
LITTLE JOURNEYS INTERSECTION BY INTERSECTION
The high-up traffic signal before me dangles in the wind. My car automatically obeys, comes to an idling stop, giving me time to glance around and see what’s to see this sunny day.
Out the left driver’s window a greyhaired man sits atop a decorative brick barricade on the street corner. Twenty feet away towers a cold glass and steel medical facility. The greyhaired man is wearing hospital slippers and an open-backed green hospital smock, his legs bare from the knees down. He sits alone in puzzled silence, suspended somewhere between co-pay instructions and the healing arts and a someday hospice.
Ahead of me, the widescreen windshield exposes static buildings and passing pedestrians, pedestrians focused on their journeys and oblivious to the solitary greyhaired man.
Out the right-hand passenger window I see static faces of people who wait…wait for a bus, wait for an Uber, wait for a lift. One face animatedly converses with an invisible phone pal, another face squints against the sun to see the traffic light, yet another face looks up to his package-toting mom and squeezes tight her free hand. Another face stares dreamily at nothing much.
In the rear view mirror a driver peers at her reflection and adjusts makeup.
The signal clicks and changes color and grants permission to my car to proceed.
All the lives I’ve just borne witness to are whisked away as I continue my journey to the next stop and the next up-close views of this dazzling and diverse and sometimes delightful Deep South village
© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.