The dice of the gods are always loaded

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The early hint of pending sunrise stirs something within me and I open my eyes for a split second, just to see whether I’m really awake or just dreaming another neverending dream about waking up.

Looks like a new day is about to occur.

I turn over on my side and hug the pillow, wishing for one more minute of sweet sleep, wondering if it’s still nighttime or just dark and cloudy. What time must it be? Hmmm. I punch the tiny light on the bedside alarm clock and see that it’s already 7:21 a.m.—just about the exact time that I awaken every day.

Will today be different from yesterday? I squint and try to visualize my pocket calendar. What was I supposed to do on the way to work this morning? Maybe make a bank deposit, perhaps purchase a new supply of MoonPies for the shop, drop off the laundry…things like that.

I lie suspended, backtiming my schedule from 10:30 a.m. when the bookstore doors must open, to right now. Each chore will take a certain amount of time to accomplish. If I don’t dawdle, I should be able to get everything done by then, plus do all the rituals: shower, brush, dry, primp, dress, greet Liz, pack a lunchbag, take out the trash, jumpstart the station wagon.

All told, everything will take exactly enough time to fill the period between 7:21 and 10:30. It always does.

How does this work?

Well, it’s kind of like life, isn’t it? I receive the gift of 24 hours every 24 hours. It’s groundhog day every day, with variations.

If I always have 24 hours to use, how come I conjure up carloads of excuses for NOT having 24 hours? I hear myself and others saying, “I don’t have time to read anymore.” “I want to write but I just don’t have time.” “Someday, when I get the time, I want to learn to play chess.” “I ran out of time and didn’t get to it.” “Time flies.” “I need an extra hour in the day.” “Where does the time go?” And so on.

Sounds like I use this made-up construct, TIME, as my excuse for everything I don’t get done. It’s pretty handy, a universally applied technique for not fulfilling potential.

So, what is my point? By now, I should be saying something sage to clear up this tangled mess of thoughts, something you and I can take with us and ruminate over during the available 24 hours.

I guess I’m just chastising myself, reminding myself to stop making excuses for not having enough time. For every hour that I waste channel-surfing or facebooking or tweeting, I could be fulfilling my dream of writing the Great American Book page by page by page. For every hour I spend gossiping or idly chatting or taking up with people I’m supposed to take up with (as opposed to those I really WANT to take up with), I could be addressing the hundredfold procrastinated projects I know should be tackled. But my addiction to wasting chunks of 24 hours seems pervasive and difficult to lick.

So, what about that interval between 7:21 and 10:30? If I weren’t afraid to accomplish many things outside my comfort zone, I could do twice as much and make myself proud. For instance, I could stop for three minutes and write Liz a love note. I could pause and exchange pleasantries with the elderly man passing by the house. I could clean out the back seat of the wagon so that it didn’t have the appearance of a thrift store cart. I could lope around the block and work on reducing my Pillsbury Doughboy waistline.

Dream on.

It’s so comfortable to follow a routine each day, stretching it out in order not to face utilizing time wisely.

The only way I can make myself feel better about this situation is to make time-squandering my full-time vocation. I could tell folks that it is my profession, this stretching out of time, this meandering to avoid taking life head-on.

If I convince myself of this fabricated truth, then I can feel comfortable and satisfied that life is great and that I’m living the 7:21 dream to its fullest.

Time-squanderers of the world, unite and proceed! So far, we’re doing a great job

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Zen and the Art of Cringing at the Washee Quickee

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Zen and the Art of Cringing at the Washee Quickee

It’s a beautiful, clear autumnal morning, a morning so bright with sunlight and particulate-free air that I can immediately spot one of the horrors of Fall…my filthy automobile.

Yep, the ol’ Sable is solid white, meaning that if I wear my contact lens and gaze objectively at the car’s metal surface, I come to realize that nobody else knows that this vehicle is white. Layers of grime and dust create a new color that is not only indescribable but probably unpatentable.

Every few years I treat myself to a Cleansing of the Station Wagon—about the same length of time it takes to rev up enough gumption to cross the street in front of my shop and get a shoe shine at the Goodyear Shoe Hospital.

So, I gird my courage and head for the Washee Quickee Car Wash, hoping that the scrawny, grouchy old man isn’t on duty like last time.

Jumpstarting my Time Machine I quickly adjust the year-o-meter and glide back to the experience of my last visit to Washee Quickee, which has been in business since the 1950′s. I can only recall being repelled by Mr. Grouchy, who, while dabbing at spots here and there on the car, lets out a constant stream of profanity and scatalogical references that might insult a millionaire rapper. He seems mad, angry, mean-spirited and ready to strangle anybody who gets close, so I slink away and hide at the front office till the car is paroled back into my care.

This guy failed to show up for the Washee Quickee public relations seminar.

Anyhow, being basically an optimist, today I decide to risk a car wash, hoping that the facility has changed hands or that there’s been some kind of turnover in personnel.

There’s no simple way to determine the System at Washee Quickee on the first visit—you just have to figure it out. The entrance is complicated and umarked and the staff rolls its collective eyes when you don’t know the rules.

“Turn off the engine! Roll up the windows! Put it in neutral. Leave the keys! Get out!”

These are the barked instructions, only they roll rapidly off the tongue and overlap each other so that you have to have them repeated once or twice to make sure you are following the rules. When you turn your car over to a stranger for 15 minutes, you want to get it back—you don’t want to lose it on a technicality.

Even though the quality of gruffness is still at its usual high level, at least the grouchy old man is nowhere to be seen, so you count your blessings and abandon your vehicle.

Up front, in the moldy-fragranced waiting area, there’s a TV blaring, a couple of men are staring at the tube, where people are shouting profanities and punching each other—stand-ins for the grouchy old man.

I look at the clerk window and see that no-one is on duty. I peer around to find somebody who will take my money. A woman is sitting in the back of the office with her back to me, gazing at a computer screen. I wait a minute or two, give up, and head for a chair, at which point the woman yells, “This is where you pay!” Like my elementary school teachers, she has rear-view vision.

I pay and plop myself down with a copy of a three-year-old ESPN magazine. The employees wandering in and out are cordial, as are the waiting customers. I can get through this!

Out front of Washee Quickee, once my car is delivered in whitened condition, I notice a long streak of grime that hasn’t been touched. The employee quickly makes it disappear, explaining, “Them guys (the ones within the car wash) don’t notice nothin’.”

I thank him profusely and tip him, grateful for having survived another trip to the nether world of car washery.

“Your car is clean!” Liz notices with delight that night. She is relieved that her embarrassment level will be reduced a few points next time she rides with me.

And, for a few days, I drive around feeling like I’ve just had a great shoe shine

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Autumn Light of the October Country Trumps the World at Large

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The autumn light of the October country sculpts everything in this sunny room and re-creates it in its own image.

Right now, I am at the Ruffner Mountain Nature Center meeting room, immersed in the tiny vibrant world of poetry and poets.

Those who are present reflect the autumn light with their smiles. We’re all here because we want to be here. We’re all here because They don’t know we’re here, They don’t know we’re having a good time, and what They don’t know won’t allow Them to get at us.

Poet Jerri Beck is reading from her new collection TRIBAL MARKINGS, and we the present-and-accounted-for are sharing her creative outpouring and imagining our own lives contrasted to hers.

It occurs to me that in my innards I am the sum total of just Three Things: the writings of others, my own writings, and the experiences I survive. When you find me not experiencing or reading or writing, you can be sure that I am There, not Here.

Bits and pieces of Wisdom and Warning and Wishing float through the imagination and excitedly raise their hands to get attention. Just now, a quote that has resided within for decades waves at me:

“In the city of the insane, the sane are kept behind bars.” 

–Erich Fromm

Being an emotive scholar-observer (perhaps known today as merely a Nerd), it is easy to accept such thoughts as normal. While others are nestled all snug in their beds with visions of smartphones and football and chainsaw films and recreational pharmaceuticals prancing through their heads, my own skull experiences philosophical ponderings and why-nots and what-ifs and how-could-theys and why-is-this’s.

Since it’s the only way to be Me that I know about, I can only hope that it is the Right Way—the Right Way being the way that doesn’t hurt anybody, causes the least amount of collateral damage, makes things easier to endure. On a good day that’s where I am.

So…when I notice that the society around me seems insane at times, those are the times that I search for the sane folks, the folks who aren’t doing crazy or acting crazy or being crazy.

That explains today, the day I get to spend an hour with poets—some of whom don’t know they are poets, others of whom practice poetry and love it. An afternoon like this lends its own comfort to me—the comfort that assures me that, just for a moment, the insane world can have its way without even missing me. If there’s no roll call, I can get away with being peaceful, pleasant, creative, gentle, standing next to other people who just for a moment are also being peaceful, pleasant, creative, gentle.

The autumn light of this October country doesn’t notice us at all. It just is.

And since the insane generally don’t pay much attention to invisible beings like us, we usually get away with being sane. Don’t tell them about us. They’ll try to recruit us with a sales pitch but they’ll be thinking all the time about the bars we could be behind

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Once Upon a Time, Long Before You and Me

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Saturday, October 12, 2013 A.D.

Once upon a time, long before you and me, my mother was born.

Yesterday would have been her 100th birthday.

“WOULD have been her 100th birthday” doesn’t sound exactly right. Actually, it WAS her 100th birthday, she just couldn’t be here to celebrate in person. Or rather, I couldn’t be where she is to celebrate. There are cosmic barriers to such things, you know.

Tomorrow, I will travel to Cuba, Alabama, to visit my mother’s baby sister, Aunt Margaret McGee Hardin. The occasion, husband Uncle Lamar’s 90th birthday, is as good an excuse as any…an excuse to enter the heart of the heart of the Alabama countryside and check up on the Theory of Relativity—that theory being, “In the long run, after all is lived and almost done, it’s Family that matters most, in both memory and reality.” No use trying to escape this theory, because olde times from childhood will not be forgotten, will continue to make themselves  known, will persistently rise up and remind you of your evolution from child of the womb to child of the universe to child of the unknown After Here.

On the way to Aunt Margaret’s home, Liz and I will pick up sister Barbara Reed Partrich at our mother’s home on Old Eastwood Avenue in Tuscaloosa. Barbara has traveled from Columbia, South Carolina, to attend Uncle Lamar’s party.

On the way back from Cuba, maybe the three of us will visit Mom’s burial site to wish her a happy birthday, and stand at the nearby graves of our father and sister Rosi.

We will chat and laugh and reminisce and wipe away an occasional tear, and the lively conversation will include all six of us, since we know in our hearts exactly what Rosi and Mom and Dad would say if we could only hear them.

It will be a nice visit.

And maybe—just maybe—once upon a time in the near future, someone Liz and Barbara and I have left behind will do the same with us, be we coffin-bound or ash-scattered. We’ll be Somewhere Else, but the reunion will be fun anyhow.

At least, maybe the remaining celebrants will get a chuckle out of my epitaph, which will read, NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD IN MIND

 

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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The Lesson of the Woman of a Certain Age

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The Woman of a Certain Age walks calmly and deliberately down the middle of 17th Street South. She stares straight ahead and straight through the Man with the Big Old Station Wagon, who is exiting his vehicle carrying in one hand a large plastic drink cup.

The Man with the Big Old Station Wagon first wonders whether the Woman of a Certain Age is someone he knows, or someone he should know, but he cannot tell. Then, he wonders whether she is approaching him to panhandle, which would not be an uncommon act in these here parts these days.

The closer she gets, the more it becomes apparent that she is indeed not someone he knows, that she is also not preparing to panhandle him. Not knowing what else to do, and fearing she might stop and capture his time through conversation, he pretends not to notice her, closes the door and walks around the car away from her, as if he never noted her presence.

The Woman of a Certain Age walks on by, still in the center of the street, and he guesses that perhaps she’s in the center of the street in order to avoid the sidewalk potholes and cracks that abound on Southside Birmingham. Or maybe she feels safer in the street, since this places some distance between her and strangers and yapping dogs and unwanted familiarities. He would understand fully, were this the case.

He is relieved because this is his day off. During the week, a happy prisoner of his own shop, he is obliged to face and deal with any and all manner of humanity, much as a bartender, trapped behind a bar, listens to an incredible array of stories and demands and jokes and rants. He enjoys all those stories and demands and jokes and rants because they are sure material for the writings and commentaries he produces regularly for his own entertainment and for his followers. But, on his day off, he finds relief and solace in dealing solely with people of his own choosing. During the week, there is no choice. Furthermore, his day off is the day he recovers and rejuvenates from the energy it takes to deal with all those stories and demands and jokes and rants.

He silently thanks the Woman of a Certain Age for passing on by. Should she enter his shop next week, he will give her his full attention, he will be happy to listen to all those stories and demands and jokes and rants, because that is what good store-owners should do.

The Man in the Big Old Station Wagon walks up the stairs of his front porch, unlocks the front door, closes it behind him, and breathes more easily, anticipating an afternoon of peace and quiet.

He goes upstairs, activates the computer, and writes this love note to you

© 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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The Final Resting Place of All Objects Wonderful

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As Jerry Seinfeld recently insinuated, the daily repetitiveness of life can be mind-numbing if you let it get the best of you.
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I understand the sentiment.
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On any given day it’s easy to let down my guard and allow reality to creep in and crawl about, disrupting the fun and funny things that abound.
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Fortunately, there are different kinds of reality, some frightening, some quite wonderful.
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At the Museum of Fond Memories, I admit only the good realities, the good memories, the good memorabilia, shockingly stunning positive reminders of how nice life can be, how nice recalling the best of times can feel.
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That’s why there are thousands of objects on view, each designed to caress a specific fond memory and jolt it into action before you have time to forbid its ability to make you smile—even when you are dead set against smiling this particular day. The right object will get to you, and you just may have a lovely moment you did not attempt to have.
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Maybe I can get to you right this moment. If you dare to let me, simply click below and close your eyes for two minutes:
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That wasn’t so painful, was it? Seinfeld would be proud.

Let’s do this again sometime

(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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The Last of the Red-Hot Neighborhood Watchers

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The Last of the Red-Hot Neisghborhood Watchers

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The Queen of Southside Birmingham is dead.

Long live the Queen.

Our 92-year-old neighbor Margaret Selman left us happy. She wanted nothing more than to join her late husband and best friend, Frank, and she died smiling and excitedly talking about the prospect. She left us neighbors happy—happy with good memories of the way she ran the ‘hood for nearly a century.

This is not some kind of soppy obituary designed to paint Margaret as a perfect person, not designed to make you think I was always the best neighbor I could be. I just want you to get a quick thumbnail image of Margaret in your mind.

First of all, her throne was the wrap-around porch of the big two-story 1906 home she and Frank kept immaculate all those years. She held court each evening when the weather was right, and folks came from miles around to sip some sweet tea and share gossip and laughter for a few minutes under Frank’s big ceiling fan.

Any evening you might see a parked police car, indicating some officers were sitting and chatting and catching up on street news. An occasional city council member or merchant or dogwalker or wanderer or priest might stop and smile and listen to Margaret’s very long, very detailed, and very accurate tales. And she remembered each and every person, if not by name, then certainly by physical description.

One other thing: Nobody ever said NO to Margaret and got away with it. She was a powerhouse persuader, and most of us just learned to give in and enjoy the ride. Frank never said NO to her, either. He would give her anything she ever wanted. And he loved every minute of it.

Margaret was a walking genealogy reference and historian—she could recite the names and addresses of each and every family who had lived in each and every house for a two-block radius over a seven-decade period. And she knew where the bodies were buried. She knew who was Catholic, who was Jewish, who was Heathen, who was kind, who was spirited, who was unkind. You could always run a character reference on someone you didn’t know.

And she was a great guardian of the ‘hood. At any hour of the day or night, she and Frank would chase ambulances and fire engines if they stopped nearby, always ready to help stressed-out people, always ready to fill in the details of the incident when you dropped by later.

This was Margaret’s neighborhood, and she felt safe and protected no matter what went on around her, because she remembered how safe and protected she had been as a little girl in the big house in the 1920′s and ’30′s. After all, she resided in the house for all but two of her 92 years and would never consider moving anywhere else.

Just the other afternoon, when Margaret’s daughter Becky walked across the yard to tell me her mom had gone away a few minutes earlier, still smiling, I felt the slam of a large dome dropping over the ‘hood. For a few moments, the dome retained all the laughter and fun we’d had over the  decades, laughing and talking and eating all the wonderful sweets the Selmans kept on hand for guests, all the babies and grandbabies and great-grandbabies Margaret had bounced on her knee, all the time she’d come to our rescue and we to hers. Then, the dome lifted, no longer needed, since all the good times were permanently embedded in my own memories and the memories of everyone who ever spent time with her. Now we can carry her sweet smile and bawdy laughter with us as inspiration for how we will treat our own family and acquaintances.

Margaret and Frank were the models for what good neighbors can be.

And rather than wistfully rue their passing, it’s fitting that I carry their legacy forward and become a model neighbor myself. As difficult as that might be

(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed

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The Mystery of the Tilted Skirt and the Airy Toga

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In memory most fertile, my time machine takes me back to THE STAGE….THE THEATRE…THE COMPANY OF THESPIANS.

I’m way back in time now, when I am  a young teenager who loves nothing better than to be On Stage, acting in a play. Performing gets into my blood early on, in grammar school, when I learn that the only time anybody pays attention to what I do or say is when I am in front of an audience.

Don’t ask me why this is true, I don’t understand it myself. Other shy people have shared similar experiences—being shy, some of them naturally gravitate toward the performing arts.

Anyhow, being an ACTOR is fun. Mainly, because I get to be around ACTRESSES—they pay attention to me while girls at school primarily ignore me.

The fact that I’m an ACTOR instead of an ACTRESS is quite a relief. I’ve learned that wearing a dress or skirt or toga on stage is no fun at all.

For instance, I go down to the high school auditorium to try out for a part in a touring PASSION PLAY—the theatrical troupe needs local extras and I’ve never been in a national production, so I hang around till they cast me as one of Jesus’ disciples. I’m in yet another play!

During first rehearsal, I learn two valuable lessons—first, never do anything to distract the audience. I’m sitting at the Last Supper and Jesus is passing around bread and wine. As the bread nears, I notice that a cup is blocking the way and will probably be knocked over by the distracted actor sitting next to me. I quickly move the cup—just in time—but am also quickly chastised for the unrehearsed movement. Oops! I just upstaged Jesus himself!

The other lesson I learn is that biblical garb is airy—I’m wearing a short gladiator-length tunic and feel about as naked as a newborn. How do women adjust to this kind of potential exposure? Being a “pro,” I pretend it’s not a problem and manage to perform in the play and retain my modesty, but a major life decision is made: I’ll never accept a stage role that requires any garb other than pants. I’m not cut out to dress like modern women or ancient men.

My father is partially relieved, since his generation quietly fears that, by hanging around gay men and loose women in the theatre, I just might “become” one of the former or carouse with one of the latter. I wind up carousing with less-than-loose women a bit, so he replaces his homophobia with loosewomenaphobia. Talk about mixed emotions—he’s relieved I’m not gay, but now he’s worried I’m going to get into trouble with them female types!

Anyhow, I still enjoy the fact that women usually wear dresses and skirts, but I’m glad I’m not required to wear them. After acting, I know how it feels, and I am left with a kind of awe at how self-confident women must be compared to men. Makes me respect them that much more.

Guess I’ll hitch up my pants and see whether Liz would like to carouse

 

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Outside-in socks, neatly folded underpants and buttoned-up Book-Em Danno shirts as evidence of character

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Outside-in socks, neatly folded underpants

and buttoned-up Book-Em Danno shirts as evidence of character

 

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.

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

 

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Under the dome of Birmingham: Stalking the elusive mom and pop breakfast places

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The man of a certain age sits alone in the diner, his girth mastering most of the booth space.

He eats his breakfast as if he’s never eaten before, smacking and stuffing and sopping and glugging, like he’s not had a meal for days, though it’s evident that he’s been frequently well-fed and well-groomed. He leans into the food and stuffs away, his blow-dried sprayed whitening hair and monogrammed track pullover shirt quivering in the morning fluorescent light.

He is his own world for a few minutes in the crowded eatery.

Across the room, a mustachioed baseball-capped good ol’ boy with hand in napkinned lap eats mannerly and methodically, gazing all the while into the indiscernable space before him, ignoring the blaring TV set hanging from the ceiling.

Worldly waitresses, ears slanted from cached pencils, skillfully walk the tightrope assigned to their lot—the tightrope walk between appearing simultaneously aloof and chummy, careful to balance the roles of Mom and Flirt and Nurturer and Businesswoman while keeping all these morning shovelers of food happy and distant.

Four elderly men at Table 4 grunt and chat and laugh and tease as they relate oft-repeated stories about how the world is going to hell and how the young people these days…

They are having the best time they’ll have all day, for a smattering of minutes avoiding all responsibility and duty and honey-do tasks which will face them down later in the morning, no matter what.

One four-year-old sits with his grandmother and diligently stabs into waffles and syrup and butter with zeal usually assigned to a nervous dog digging for its favorite bone. In just a few years, he, too, will be trying to find the perfect breakfast place that replicates this perfect childhood experience he’s having right now.

He, like all of us in the diner, is imprinted with the combination of taste, texture, fragrance, feel of what it’s like to be in a safe, familiar, non-threatening place, being cared for by kindly strangers whose only goal is to feed you well and stay out of your way while you soak up all that nurturing atmosphere, the nurturing atmosphere you take with you to start the day right, even if later on, some grumbly non-breakfasted bastard wonders why you’re in a better mood than he is, and tries to take it all away from you

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