Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast:  https://youtu.be/eqT5ONjFgto

or read his story below:

THE WAITING ROOM OF THE VANITIES

I am right here right now…here in an unaccustomed room sitting atop unaccustomed furniture surrounded by cloned and soul-deprived magazines and sales brochures and neutral wall hangings and lifeless crisscrossed carpet tiles and a genuine artificial potted plant…

How many other waiting rooms have I experienced during this awkwardly extended lifetime? How many more waiting rooms are waiting for me to wait within them? Just what is a waiting room?

I look around.

The unfamiliarity of this cubed space is intentional, I suppose. Was this room’s original designer considering the feelings and fears and hopes and lives of future temporary occupants? Or was the designer merely working quickly within budget and space restrictions to come up with something saleable and boss-acceptable?

What else weighs upon me in this special neutered space?

Well, it is silent. No unidentifiable music piping in, no large-screen-image device screaming for my attention and my wallet.

What else is missing?

There is no clock to remind me whether the system is on time or tardy or suspended. There is no intentional sound, just the hovering hum of air conditioning, the muted mutterings of people in the hallway. Just the sound of my own voices at conflict with one another.

Oh, and there is no mirror. That’s just as well, because whenever I pass by a mirror I am amazed at what I see. Just who is that old dude who is concealing my 22-year-old self?Inside I am young. Outside, there is something else going on—the aging process that does not permit me to cast a vote aye or nay. I am disenfranchised.

Now and again, another waiting room denizen visits, sits, stares at some palmed device, eventually exits.

What’s the good news in this room? There is no lock on the door. I can leave whenever. But I don’t leave whenever because that would mean having to re-start the process of setting up computerized appointments using computerized systems and computerized voices and triggering computerized reminder calls. I’ll just continue waiting, if you please.

I sit here, unaccustomed.

Maybe this is better than I imagine, this waiting room of the vanities. At least I am in-between dramas. Before I entered I was just a preemie. While I’m here I am cocooned and protected from other realities. In just a little while I will be released to the world, sadder but wiser—or happier but wiser.

This place is protective of me and my thoughts and all knowledge of the outer world. Maybe it’s a chapel of meditation and I just now realize it. Just in time to be summoned into the hallway for my next trek toward the unknown

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s audio podcast: 

http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/outsideinsocksneatlyfolded.mp3

or read his diary below:

BUTTONED-UP BOOK ‘EM, DANNO! SHIRTS AS EVIDENCE OF CHARACTER

I found this entry from some years back, in the Red Clay Diary today.

Seems like a worthy subject to re-ponder:

This evening, I open the first big bag of wash-dry-fold from an unfamiliar neighborhood laundry and wish for the best.

After all, for decades, the Laundry Ladies at the just-closed Flamingo Cleaners have been taking care of us—the Reed family of 17th Street South. Each week, I gather everything dirty-but-washable into these drawstring bags and toss them over the banister to the foyer below. The resultant THUDS are part of the ritual of the morning. Then, I lug the bags to the car and drop them off on the way to work. At the end of the day, there are few things more satisfying than still-warm gently-sorted-and-folded sweet-smelling garments ready to be tucked away in closets and drawers. The most satisfying part of this ritual is the fact that, in all these decades, I haven’t had to wash a single item of clothing myself!

Back in a previous life, the task of sitting for hours in a laundromat usually fell to me, and I always considered it to be an incredible waste of perfectly good time. I recall as a small child watching my mother literally toil over clothes-washing, having to stir  and scrub them by hand in a tub, rinse them, wring them out, hoist the water-heavy garments onto her shoulders to the backyard, where they were one by one tidily smoothed straight and hung out to dry, later to be brought inside, pressed, sorted, folded and put away.

But, as I say, I got out of having to feed quarters into broken machinery many moons ago, and my mother eventually got some machinery that made her life somewhat easier. I just never got her toil out of my mind and hoped my wife would never have to do what she had to do.

Anyhow, the Laundry Ladies always took care of the task, usually with good humor and silent professionalism. And, unlike Mother, they were paid to do so.

But today is the first day I’ve had to use a new wash-dry-fold facility, and I’m hoping for the best. To protect your clothes from dust and other damaging elements, you may need to install storage cabinets in your closet with the help of a Closet Designer.

As I empty the clothes onto the upstairs master bed, I’m pleasantly surprised. And grateful! That’s because I begin to realize, as I put things away, that the new laundry folder has added personality to the process. My socks, always turned inside-out because I wear them that way, have been methodically matched and turned outside-in, because that’s the way socks should be. My BOOK-EM DANNO shirts are not only folded, but they are buttoned up—something I’ve never experienced. Everything is categorized and ready to use.

This might be evidence of someone who truly loves the job of washing-drying-folding, someone who takes pride in the task, someone who gains some degree of satisfaction from having done well what could be considered an uninteresting and repetitive chore.

So, what’s the difference between this service worker and my previous Laundry Ladies?

Not much, on one level—the Laundry Ladies were very proficient, friendly, poorly paid and overworked, but they kept on keeping on, doing what they could do, and doing it dependably well. The mysterious new laundry worker is equally task-driven and polite, but that extra bit of care, that WILLINGNESS TO DO MORE THAN THE JOB REQUIRES, speaks of an earlier generation, an almost forgotten work ethic that only us geezers with good memories recall.

This makes me wish to do a shout-out of THANKS! to all people who rise above their potentially humdrum jobs. The people who take time to find some joy and satisfaction in the hands they are dealt. The people who tend to do that special one little thing beyond the call of duty and cause an involuntary smile to appear on a customer’s face.

Makes me want to be a better worker myself

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/wBP_IgYPlsM

or read his tale…

INCARCERATING THE PINK AND AQUA-EDGED YELLOW STRIPE RAINBOW

 Just standing here at the edge of my 1906-built home on the big city’s south side, old time lyrics creep into my unfiltered mind, “It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea…”

I look out over the carpenter-gothic and condo-lined street and await the arrival of my true love.

It’s a generational rumble, this little avenue of leftover dreams. The modern structures on one side, the ancient wooden houses on the other, facing off each day and actually getting along, coexisting just fine.

My gaze drifts upward to take in something prettier than phone and cable line criss-crossings and teetering wooden support poles and fractured sidewalks and potholed battlefields and grammatically-challenged signage.

Up, up in the Maxfield Parrish clouds a rainbow fades itself into existence. For a few minutes, that’s all I can see, all I care to see.

Can I see it on your behalf?

This particular rainbow has no specified beginning, an invisible ending way beyond, but in between sports its colors. The three stripes begin on the upper edge with a light rose pink kind of effect. The lower track is aqua, almost transparent. Between is a remarkable lemon-yellow stripe rendering the other colors unable to collide and conflict. No rumble here, this day at least.

The lyrics keep repeating themselves in a Nat King Cole-Ella Fitzgerald amalgam,  ”It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea…”

I find myself smiling without benefit of audience, without any attempt to please anybody else. I’m just smiling at this wonderful, pure sight hovering blissfully out of reach of the day to day toil and disarray of the village, the admixture of life and dream, reality and illusion.

If I capture this mirage, firefly it in a jar, will it die of incarceration? Will it no longer exist because of my interference?

I leave the rainbow alone, it leaves me alone. We regard each other and exist in peace.

And for a few ticks of the celestial timepiece, all is calm, all is bright

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/hIdEDkvcsbg

or read forth, below:

IT’S A MOODY ELEVATOR KIND OF DAY

An oblong thick plastic credit card-sized key grants me entrance to a big-city parking deck behind the bookstore.

Without this key, my work day would be spent inserting handfuls of quarters into disorderly and often malfunctioning parking meters. All this activity to restrain the gleeful meter-monitor person who races to issue overtime penalties to anyone who stays too long downtown.

It is a game I no longer play. I would just as soon pay a monthly fee to the parking deck cartel so that the security of my automobile will be assured.

So, here I am, dodging impatient traffic in order to drive into the deck entrance. I wave the key at an unreachable sensor and something magically causes the creaky wooden blockade arm before me to elevate itself long enough to allow entrance.

I steer the car through six levels of obtusely-stationary vehicles in order to park in a diagonal space on the seventh level.

I gather my jacket and aluminum beverage cup, step onto unpainted concrete, and head for the dreaded elevators.

I stand between two double-doored elevators, punch the slightly askew DOWN button and await my fate.

It is a toss-up as to which elevator will arrive. I listen for metallic pulley sounds and grinding mechanisms as the strains of elevation sound out. I gaze through the adjacent windows at the city below me and scrutinize office and condo windows for signs of life.

To my dismay, it is the left-hand elevator that opens its doors to me. This is the one that recently stopped halfway up, halfway down, stranding a lone passenger till rescuers freed him. This is also the elevator that sometimes opens and closes by itself, sometimes half-opens, then shuts, before I can board it.

Several weeks back, I meet an elevator repair man who is cutting and pasting and oiling the shaft innards to keep them operating. He nervously and apologetically reports that the elevators are old and perhaps past their prime. His assignment is to keep running a hundred or so units around town so that the machinations of commerce and governance keep racing along.

So, today, this morning, I step gingerly through  the open doors and do an about-face. I punch the ONE button and wait to see what adventure will befall me between level seven and level one.

As the doors slide shut, I squint at the posted inspection certificate and note that the elevator has not passed inspection for sixteen months. I wonder whether an elevator loses flavor after its expiration date.

The elevator stops at level six, the doors grind open, no visible being enters, the doors close and the descent resumes. The elevator stops at level five, opens to invisibles or ghosts or spirits, closes again. This continues for each level until Number One pops up.

I hold my breath and await my fate, hoping against hope that the doors will slide apart and allow me to escape the pursuing hounds of imagination

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/s8quNZnyh3g

or read on…

Deep South Tales Both Actual and True

Who isn’t present at last Friday’s family reunion?

I wander among the relatives and semi-relatives scattered about the room, looking deep into eyes that sometimes match my genes, my kinships.

This annual gathering of people whose lives overlap with mine is comforting and glad, poignant and sad, funny and…well, a bit of everything.

Each year, there are more children, each year there are fewer oldtimers, each year, last year’s young’uns have grown a bit older, each year I marvel at the mysteries of birth and death, the rambunctious progression of wrinkles and wry humor, that characterize this family.

Each year, someone present last year is now missing.

Each reunion makes me want to go back and visit in three dimensions the good times of yesteryear.

But this is the only way I know how to visit: I write down my memories in order to keep alive the good people, the good times.

This is one of many memories recorded in my Red Clay Diary:

HOW MANY Z’S IN ZZZZZ?

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….

I’m lying abed in this small plaster-ceilinged bedroom I share with brother Ronny.

The time is longer ago than you might remember, or maybe even before you were born.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….

It is just after sunrise. I am slowly drifting back and forth between slumber and wakefulness. Dreams are fading into daydreams. Reality is creeping in to take over.

My ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s are turning into snorts, then into eyes wide open…

In the living room, the Sunday newspaper comic strips await.

The comics are everything on Sunday morning. That’s where I learn what those ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s mean. They are shorthand for Sleeping Soundly.

When a comic strip cartoonist wants me to know that a character is asleep or dozing, a row of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s informs me. When a cartoon bubble hovering above Little Orphan Annie’s head is dripping tiny closed circles, I know that this is what Annie is thinking, not what she is saying aloud. And so on.

I idly wonder how many Z’s are grammatically proper.

But I’m lying here in my bunk bed, now fully awake but hoping that if I can visualize those ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s floating above my head, I can convince anyone peeking into the room that I am still asleep. Can’t they see the Z’s?

It doesn’t work, this attempt to make palpable a cartoonist’s Morse code. I try to pretend sleep, but older sister Barbara opens the door a crack to call me to breakfast. “I see your eyelids moving. You’re awake!” she grins gleefully. I can never fool Barbara.

I swat away the floating ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s and dangle my feet over the side of the mattress. I’m on the top bunk, so part of becoming fully awake is the jolt to the system that I feel when I leap into the vast space between here and hardwood floor.

Time to pretend I’m awake for another day. Time to do little kid things that little kids do on Sunday mornings.

Time to find the Sunday paper and discover what Dagwood is doing—is he asleep on the couch under ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s? What about The Phantom—does he ever sleep? And Snuffy Smith? I know he knows all about Z’s, as does Pappy Yokum. As does brother Ronny on the bottom bunk. They are my kind of people.

To this day, many decades later, I envy those people, real-lifed and cartooned, who know how to catch a few ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s any time they please. Or at least any time their cartoonist so deems.

Or any time sister Barbara isn’t looking

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/0zTgM_tAog0

or read his words below:

EXCAVATING HOPE FROM THE RUINS OF FALLEN DREAMS

A scrawny pedestrian hikes the wilds of the chaos city.

He leans into the warmed-over breeze, backpack causing him to chug forward at slug pace.

He holds a very long unopened umbrella in his left hand, ever ready to draw it from ragged scabbard with right hand, should foe or prey appear.

Like a bow hunter, he darts his vision side to side, up and down, wary of feral surroundings in the downtown traffic.

As he passes by the old book store, I the proprietor observe him and wonder whether he’s ever read a book voluntarily, whether he has ever found pleasure in writing or ingesting inscribed paper thoughts. The scrawny man sideglances and acknowledges me, but maintains his errant pace.

Setting out the OPEN sign for morning customers, I look at the sky above old towers and wonder what else the day will bring.

Before I can re-enter the shop, another figure hobbles by, this time a ragtag woman walking gingerly in tiny steps as if her feet are bound, her heels forcing her to tread carefully. She, too, acknowledges me but sallies forth. Her elsewhere destination is everything.

I retreat to the security of my shop and await door chimes that will announce visitors.

Next to enter are curiosity shoppers who troll the stacks in wonder, pulling volumes both ancient and modern, touching them, experiencing the weight and textures that virtual hand-held devices don’t deliver.

It is as if the shoppers are re-discovering three-dimensional reality in stark contrast to the flat screen images dominating most waking moments.

Other browsers soon arrive, some finding comfort in the existence of books loved in childhood, others gawking and appreciating near-forgotten long-lost storybooks.

Researchers and scholars and wanderers fill the day and weave past passers-by on the way to coffee across the street, on their way to fair trade objects from afar at the shop next door. On their way with book in hand to unearth what else is worth seeing in the excavated ruins of the city.

The day is filled with stories told loudly by some, stories held close and monosyllabic by others, stories in the process of being created, stories spilling over and mingling with stories lying in wait within the books.

The scrawny hunter and the hobbled woman people my thoughts. In imagination unfettered, they mingle with my customers and enjoy their company. In imagination most hopeful, these explorers and warriors find peace and camaraderie with one another.

The stragglers of the city streets are my family, the browsers my foster children, the friends and strangers alike my motivators.

At end of day, I close shop and make journey homeward, part of me in need of rest and recoup, another part of me wondering with high expectation what tomorrow will bring, what Tomorrow People will be like, what adventures I will have with these real and imaginary wisps

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast:  https://youtu.be/9rkRZIgcDGQ

or read his story…

Deep South Tales Both Actual and True

THE HISTORIC BIG SANDY CREEK WATERMELON SEED SKIRMISH 

Uncle Sam’s big shiny-toothed smile is directed at me one scorching summer afternoon. He stands waist-deep in icy water, waiting for me to take my next deep breath.

It’s the longest deep breath I’ve ever held.

I’m standing barefoot and swimming-suited atop a time-smoothed boulder on the banks of Big Sandy Creek near Tuscaloosa, just a few years after the end of World War II.

My life hangs in the balance as I try to make an important decision.

I must decide whether and when to jump into the coldest cold water in my  known universe. Big Sandy is always chilling to the senses, way colder than any other creek or stream anywhere around, making it difficult for most of us kids and relatives to tolerate it for long. Will I enter or will I retreat?

I take one more look around me, looking for a sign, but all I see is cousins and aunts and uncles and parents. They are all preoccupied with the duties of summer—-skimming pebbles across running waters, spreading blankets on the red clay ground, opening picnic baskets and spreading snacks and goodies about, shooing flies and gnats away from body and edibles, playing tag among the pines, hiking up swimming trunks that are soggy and descending, heaving a large watermelon from the water, sunning themselves on grass and stone.

I can’t hold my breath any longer. My toes are twitching, curling in anticipation of slamming into barely tolerable  temperatures. My hesitancy hordes a secret, and that secret is the fact that I do not know how to swim and that I would rather Uncle Sam did not learn this fact. He’s been known to toss kids into water just to see whether they know how to swim or whether they are skilled at sinking like stones.

There has got to be a way to avoid becoming one of Uncle Sam’s experiments.

Splat!

That’s the sudden sound of a small dark missile bouncing off my right temple. I snap a sideways glance just in time to spy Cousin Jerry squeezing a watermelon seed between thumb and finger, aiming a second volley at my head.

All my attention is diverted. I jump off the boulder onto the bank and run toward the watermelon slices that Mother has just laid out for us. Jerry is chasing me with his cocked and loaded seed, and I am in survival mode, grabbing a slice for myself, munching into the red sweetness in order to retrieve two seeds.

I turn to Jerry, whose seedy bullet has just missed me, giving me the two seconds I need to spurt a seed at him. A nicely aimed hit to his shoulder. The Big Sandy Creek Watermelon Seed Skirmish begins!

Soon, several of us kids and adults are ducking and shooting seeds and generally laughing ourselves silly.

This is my kind of war. Nobody wins, nobody loses. We just have a good time jumping headlong out of our hot summer day routines. The rewards are immense—-we eat some really good watermelon, we run ourselves ragged, we express our happiness and camaraderie in a harmless and memorable manner, and some of us even venture into Big Sandy Creek.

Those of us who can’t swim keep Uncle Sam at a distance. Those who know how to swim have a great time with uncles and aunts and kin.

The day is a happy one, and Big Sandy Creek remains fresh in memory to this day, though I never returned to the scene of the battle. I don’t know what happened to the big smooth boulder. I don’t even know whether Big Sandy waters remain to this day the coldest in the universe.

I do know this. To this day, I do not know how to swim. To this day, seedless watermelons seem not quite normal. To this day, I would give much to enjoy just one more golden afternoon cavorting with loved and lovely family members during a harmless war, the kind of war I wish everybody knew how to wage

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed

Deep South Memories from a Red Clay Diary…

 Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast:  https://youtu.be/KBpBESt1RmY

or read his memoir below:

TEMPTATION IS WAY TOO TEMPTING

After spending ten years as a new member of my species, I begin to realize that I am in way over my head.

Way back yonder—right now, inside my diary—in the 1950s, everything seems so new, so fresh, so exciting, so…tempting.

Fortunately for me, I have my family and playmates and neighbors and teachers and relatives to keep me in line. Mostly. They are here to protect me, show me the way, warn me when I venture too far off-track, mend me when I crack or bruise or break.

This protective dome of caring and nurturing is keeping me alive and well till I can strike out on my own, which won’t be for another few years.

But the temptations remain.

When I am all alone and no-one is looking, I still am not really all alone. I keep picturing two funny and scary characters who people my world: upon my left shoulder smolders a tiny laughing, horned and pointy-tailed little red devil who eggs me on when I want to misbehave or bend unwritten rules or snap commandments in two. Upon my right shoulder resides a tiny angelic whispering little guy who whispers goodness in my ear, who pulls me back from the brink of sin and misbehavior.

These small beings are real enough in fertile imagination to balance me in my lifetime tightrope walk. Much of the time. And they fill in when I meander through solitude.

Characters like the devil and the angel formed themselves out of B-movies, comic books, Sunday school dogma, radio dramas, and stern adults who look out for my safety.

In these 1950s I don’t get away with much, at least until teenagedom encroaches and those temptations take on a hormonal power that cannot be ignored.

Now, some numerous decades later, I no longer see the angel and the devil, I no longer enjoy the safety of my long-gone grown-up protectors. Now I am fully aware that I am on my own, that I must answer to myself when I stray or when I have unacceptable inclinations. I am my own boss…which means I cannot blame anybody but myself for infractions, I cannot delegate guilt or regret to anyone but Me.

Dang! Being a grownup means I don’t look like a kid anymore. But it doesn’t mean that I am not still a kid deep within, a kid enjoying the idea of temptation, if not the reality of it.

I have become the avatar of all those families and playmates and neighbors and teachers and relatives who jump-started me. I feel free and confident and ready to face the snarkies and the meanies…most of the time.

But I keep an imaginary swatter nearby just in case the shoulder critters return one day to once again take over and confuse me. I never forget to thank them silently, these real and imaginary people who ushered me across the darkened chasm. These beings who slapped me together, patched and instructed me, brought me safely from way back then to right now, to this very minute.

Who kept me around just long enough to impart my fragile wisdom to an unexpected reader…You

© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed

Listen to Jim’s audio podcast: https://youtu.be/QYkek_Q6sJw

or read his story below…

THE FAR AGO AND LONG AWAY REUNION OF THE SPIRITS

Far ago and long away, I dreamed a dream one day.

The time is far, far ago, but it is ever fresh in memory. Some of the best times of my life were spent in Peterson, a village between Tuscaloosa and Brookwood, a stripped-out mining town. In Peterson resided my maternal grandparents, as well as various aunts and uncles and cousins, and back then, some many years ago, all us kinfolk liked nothing better than to converge and reunite and party together on a Sunday afternoon.

Now this may not be you young’uns’ idea of partying, but it was everything we knew to do, in order to have a good time. The time is long away, but here’s what a McGee reunion felt like:

Dried butterbeans under a tree in Uncle Pat and Aunt Elizabeth McGee’s sideyard. No, we didn’t eat the butterbeans except one time, and once was enough. What my uncles did with the butterbeans was use them instead of chips, to sit on the ground and play poker. The summertime buggy and humid heat was barely noticed, because the Games and the Slow Roast were the thing. Two games went on simultaneously. The poker game—in which all the winner got was a bunch of dried beans—and the baseball game on the radio. You see, back then, nobody had portable radios, so the Big Game emanated from one of the old cars in the family. One uncle would pull his car near the Game and leave the door open so we could all hear the big plays, the excited crowd, the crisp snap of wood against hide, the terse shouts of the umpire.

The Slow Roast was right next to the game—big hunks of pork turning over an open-pit fire, smoking up the surrounding woods and forcing all humans who care about eating to salivate involuntarily. Cousin Patricia reported six decades later that, after we’ve eaten, Uncle Buddy reveals that it is goat meat—not pork.

This was Division of Labor stuff back then. The men were in charge of staying up all night, tending the cooking, biding their time with poker and baseball, and trying their best to set sedentary examples of good behavior for dozens of run-amok kids. The women did everything else.

Mind you, this was the post-economic-depression era when all men worked hard at hard-time jobs, when Sundays with family were their only respite, when for a few hours they could pretend to be hotshot gamblers and master chefs and wizened tribal chiefs.

Meanwhile, cousins and their playmates were free to roam wild in Uncle Pat’s woods, chase after and be chased by spiders and snakes, attract redbugs and ticks, laugh out loud and wrestle, play their own baseball game in the nearby cornfield, pretend to be feral Tarzans and Noble Savages and in general let out all that energy that had been pent up during the week.

The women would cook and wrangle kids and socialize and gossip and knit and darn and set tables and wash dishes and collect detritus that the men would later dispose of. Both men and women would share in the arduous task of making gallons of ice cream on the spot, emptying ice and salt into buckets while older kids took turns cranking and cranking and cranking, their only motivation being the sweet taste of fresh peaches absorbed into the creamiest ice cream you could ever imagine.

Everybody knew their responsibilities in those days, nobody hid from helping out, everyone came to each other’s rescue when a bruise appeared, all accidents were tended to in gentle good humor, all conflicts were mediated and peacefully settled, all passions channeled for the good of the one-day commune.

At the end of the long day, each family would sit wearily and happily in automobiles waiting while relatives leaned close to the rolled-down car window and said 45-minute lingering goodbyes to each other. Nobody wanted to leave the scene, everybody had to, and, regardless of how tired and spent and scraped and bloated and bugbit each of us was, we couldn’t help but think about the next reunion when we’d do it all again.

Yep, far ago and long away, I dreamed a dream, a dream that still seems true when I look at the results of those strong and handsome adult relatives who set such powerful examples for us kids. The truth is in watching those kids today, now elderly kinfolk with their own kids and kids of kids, each year once more holding a reunion and passing down the generations a rich appreciation of tribe and family and genetics and mutual support.

It’s all still there, and the next reunion is next month, and I’m salivating already

Listen to Jim’s podcast: https://youtu.be/ZFH9D77DfBE

or read on…

Deep South Memories, Both Actual and True…

IMAGINEERING THE MAGIC CEILING

I am lying flat on my back in the living room of my childhood home, staring at the hard-plaster ceiling and contemplating the cracks that zigzag here and there, going nowhere in particular.

At this moment I am just Me as a kid, back here in the 1950′s when this scene—actual and true—is taking place.

Alone in the asbestos-shingled bungalow I share with two parents, two sisters, two brothers, I am enjoying the silence of the moment and doing what I do best: ruminating and cogitating and fantasizing and thinking real hard.

I am rarely alone in the house, so times like this are special.

Right now, I am wondering where my inspirations are buried. Over the years, I have hidden things so that I or some futuristic person might find these things and gleefully re-experience them someday.

For instance, there is a note squirreled away between insulation  and roofing in the back of the house. I can no longer get to this note. It is a message to myself, but I have no idea what this message contains, because it has been so long since I hid it there back while the add-on room was under construction.

In the back yard is yet another secreted treasure–-a small box with important but now forgotten objects that I want to dig up. However, I am unable to locate the spot because the hand-drawn secret map to this burial site has gone missing in the chaos of childhood.

I blink blink and stare harder at the ceiling cracks, massaging ideas and poems and stories in my head, not yet brave enough to set them down on paper. After all, only Writers can accomplish this, and I dare not call myself a writer.

These compositions will float and flourish for decades until the day comes when I will regurgitate them in the form of columns and books and blasts and blogs and podcasts. Some will remain hidden. Some will inspire others…some will find Appreciators.

Some will simply exist…waiting.

Finally, life intervenes and motivates me to arise from the floor, dust myself off, grab a snack, pocket a pad of writing paper and a pencil, and leave the house before any family members return. They might not understand the significance of my lying afloor and appearing to be doing not a thing in the world.

Another hidden note: I alone know that these few minutes have been busy and activity-filled and reanimating for me. I know, too, that those in the family who are not imagineers will think me idle.

But I also am aware that there are younger, upcoming fellow dreamers among them  who may yet blossom and expose their hidden treasures to Appreciators, too. Who may gaze deeply into the plaster cracks to see what lurks there, what hibernates there.

Appreciators who will have not a clue as to how much floor-time goes into crafting a work of art into something visible and alive

© 2019 A.D. by Jim the Reed