Listen to Jim’s blog: http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his story below:
Autumn Struggles to Make a Comeback
“I’m too old to grow up.”
–Amos Halftrack
I am floating horizontally, belly down, my face craned straight ahead to navigate the warm waters, making sweeping motions with my arms in order to move forward—only I don’t know where I’m headed, since there is nothing in sight but water before, aft, above and below. The fluid is tepid and comfortable, and there is no fear of drowning, even though in my waking life I cannot swim a stroke.
This recurrent dream is all I have at the moment, as I flail about in slow motion, hoping to surface soon and search for a shoreline.
I awaken in my own bed in my own bedroom under my own sheet, flat on my own back, staring at the white plaster ceiling, and the dream has evaporated. I slowly focus on the day, scanning the streaks of sunlight crossing the walls, feeling the diminished humidity of a pre-autumn morning as it struggles to brush away the high temperatures of a sweltering summer.
My wife breathes gently next to me, the Laurel and Hardy statues on the cabinet grin next to a toy planetarium, and books are stacked randomly about the room. The mystery of the dreaming swim seems oddly not out of place, seems comfortably logical in the scheme of things. Didn’t I begin life floating aimlessly in soothing waters, unable to determine direction or meaning? Did I not eventually come to consciousness in a room designed to introduce me to the world as gradually, as pleasantly, as possible? Am I not reborn each morning, ready to de-puzzle the day and plan my twenty-four-hour journey?
I shake these primal poetic meanderings away like so many gnats, gird myself to face down the orange traffic cones and speed bumps that will surely attempt to sack my enthusiasm, and try to brave the wilds and wits both dim and funny who get in my way, on purpose or accidentally.
Laurel and Hardy make me smile for no particular reason. Books abound and comfort me. The routines and rituals of the day provide structure and simulated direction to a life I secretly know is mysterious and unfathomable, like that pleasant nocturnal swim I occasionally take. As Carl Sandburg said, “I’m an optimist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
Even optimists know that things might not turn out all sweetness and light, but that never prevents them from searching high and low for the pony
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast