Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast:  https://youtu.be/t0nw3IksojE

or

Read his story below… 

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Life, actually…

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GOOD NIGHT STACK OF BOOKS

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Good night stack of bedside books holding firm your promise to levitate my dreams.

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Good night volumes of verse waiting for a chance to teach me how to be a better denizen of the world.

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Good night dreary tomes that make me try harder to wade chin deep through the infinite choices you lay out for my inspection.

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Good night adventures and antics and plots and twists that just cannot wait to bring me out of my doldrums and into fresh light.

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Good night books brimful of mushy ideas and aha! epiphanies and sad but loving passings.

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Good night corner-folded pages that show me where I left off and where I resume.

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Good night books topped off with nightmares and daymares and scary beginnings and happy endings.

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Good night books with texture and heft and fragrance and hints of previous readers.

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Good night books that accompany me through infancy and into youth and onward to smartly sassy adulthood and heavily responsible middle age.

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Good night books that will chaperone me into elderliness and pleasant-dream continuances.

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Good night to you, the next foster parent who will adopt and take sweet care of these living bindings and pages that meant so much to all who loved them

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© 2026 A.D. by Jim Reed