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or read Jim’s story below:
Way Back When We Knew More Than We Know Now
I go fishing for books now and then. I just rev up the old bookmobile, pop open what we down here call a Soft Drink, turn on the radio, and head Thataway, never knowing what adventures will impose themselves upon me.
My routine treks among the hilly byways of rural Alabama give me time to ponder and think and reminisce and wonder.
Sometimes, I have to switch the radio off to clear my head, especially when I hear just one too many grating grammar errors. The NPR announcer says, ”The price of cigarettes have gone up.”
Is she aware that she have made a grammatical error?
Another public radio announcer constantly refers to somebody called Utha Listener, never once explaining who Utha might be.
Yet another voice pontificates, “They have just showed up.”
She’s never been showed how to use shown correctly.
I go through a train crossing, noticing that some railroad cars do not have graffiti coating their sides. Somebody has fallen down on the job.
Howlin’ Wolf’s song pops into memory and makes me forget the errors and typos of the world around me and just feel some joy for a moment, “My baby she’s a good-looking thing you know…she’s the one who spins me round and round, one who turns me upside down” Now, that’s Love!
I pass town water towers that look somewhat like the steel-legged robots H.G. Wells imagined filled with invading Martians. I recall that I have actually seen one of these mechanisms, a tall shiny facsimile in the town square at Woking, England, near where the attackers landed.
Cruising past strip malls, I observe many women and men and children getting out of their cars, parents elaborately extracting squirming kids from car seats, lifting the ones who still like to be lifted and grumbling back at grumbling kids who like to grumble.
It’s fun to pay attention. So many people I see are not watching, not looking around to see what’s what. What thrills they are missing!
Every image, each person, seems to be about me, about my life. It’s impossible to close them out, difficult to forget them.
My fishing day is fruitful. I gather some special books here and there, hear sounds that make me cringe and smile, see faces and shadows that awaken my empathic senses, and get to look behind things to see what I might be missing.
There are probably worse ways to spend a morning in the gossipy and secretive hills of sweet Alabama
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.