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Life, actually…

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MISTER FIDGET MAKES MY DAY

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Mister Fidget skulks around inside the bookstore, picking up and examining items at random. He is always in motion, asking about this object and that object but never waiting for a complete answer from me.

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He is busy looking for the next thing before ending his perusal of the previous thing.

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Fidget is entertaining and annoying and restless. But he is a customer, and each customer is treated with respect and kindness. Each customer has something to teach me. I try to pay attention while going about the business of keeping the shop afloat.

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As he rambles about, never quite leaving each item at its original site, he talks and chatters and speaks in one continuous sentence. I can’t keep up with him but he does come up with oblique observations.

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“These pants are too tight.” He tugs at his trousers fore and aft. “You can’t get a wallet in and out of them, dammit!”

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He does go on.

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“Maybe they make these pants tight so that nobody can pick your pocket.” This idea might have some validity.

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“Boy, this is not a very good block here.” He refers to the Downtown streets where I ply my trade.

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“I can’t find any good parking places.” I wonder how he got to the shop without finding a parking place.

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“Wow! this bookstore must not have many customers down here, huh?” He is adding to the popular myth that the city is barren, a wasteland left over from the flights of the 1960s. In truth, business has never been better, and the urban township is sort of booming.

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He scattershots through the rows of vinyl records on display. “Wow, these records, some of them are broken, did you know some of these records are broken?”

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He carefully waves a chipped disc into the morning air to prove his point, never considering the fact that I, the little old storekeeper, handled and placed every single record on display myself.

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“Oh, look, here’s a record, it’s part one but there’s no part two, do you have part two?” I do have part two but he’s already on to the next shopping critique.

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“You don’t have as many records as you used to.” He immediately spies the next enormous rack and says, “Oh, look, you’ve got a whole lot of records.”

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Mister Fidget runs about the aisles talking out of earshot, not aware that he is his only listener.

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I go about my chores and help other customers. Eventually, Mister Fidget exits the establishment, promising to actually purchase a book or record when he gets his next check.

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Some store owners express annoyance at such folk, but not I. He is just as important as the next browser. That’s because he takes something valuable with him—he will tell others about his adventure. Others will tell others. Eventually new shoppers will appear, having heard something nice about this wonderful old museum of fond memories.

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Every fidgeter who comes and goes carries a message to the village at large. That’s why I do my utmost to engage with everybody, be they sightseers, tire-kickers, comparison-shoppers, curiosity seekers, explorers, readers, non-readers, tag-alongs, collectors, decorators, bargain hunters, wheelers and dealers, touchy-feelies, nostalgia ramblers.

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How they feel about the way they were treated at Reed Books will lodge in fond memory.

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And maybe, just maybe, they will mention us to others who care deeply about kindness and sweet reminiscence

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© 2024 A.D. by Jim Reed

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Listen to Jim’s podcast:

 http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/hairtodaygonetomorrow.mp3

or read his story below:

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW. 

I miss my hair.

I don’t miss barbers.

Yep, one day many, many moons ago, I had a full head of hair. Now, though, I still have lots of hair, it’s just that it’s everywhere but atop my head.

I have alarmingly fast-growing hair in my ears, my nose, on my face, on my back, on my chest, and, well, just about all over. And its rate of growth is not full-moon dependent.

Nature has a sense of humor—most of us start out bald and toothless, and we end up…dead.

Now, I know lots of guys who still go to the barbershop, or even the hair stylist, long after their heads are virtually bald. Guys with a little fallen halo of hair rimming half the head from ear to ear, still go and get it trimmed. I guess they’re holding on to every shred of dignity they can.

I don’t blame men who have enormous comb-overs. Others laugh at them, but I laugh at the laughers, who will begin losing hair long before they’re prepared to. I don’t even mind guys with ridiculously obvious toupees, since they, too, are living in the same fantasy world occupied by large-beehived women and three-strand-combover men.

So, does not having any hair mean you’ll never again go into a barbershop or hair salon? I asked one hair stylist in the Big City that question and gave her the challenge.

We brainstormed together.

If you are baldheaded, what can you get at a hair styling place?

1.  You can get your beard shaped and styled.

2.  If your baldness extends to the face, you can ask for a trim–of your nose hairs and eyebrows and ear hairs and that weird hair growing out of the top of your beauty mark.

3.  You can get a therapeutic massage and stop worrying about baldness for a few minutes.

4.  You can just have your bald pate buffed and shined or powdered or perfumed. Flaunt it! 

5.  Maybe the most fun you as a baldheaded man can have is to bring family—kids, grandkids, cousins and spouse or friend—to the hair place and sit there and thumb through the pages of beautifully coiffed models in the magazines, and just watch and enjoy the banter  and fun.

Full-head-of-hair guys, beware: an experience like this could make you want to shave your head and join the rest of us sexy devils.

Incidentally, I haven’t been to a barber since 1985, nor have I had a professional hair cut since then. But if I do start going to hair stylists/designers, I’ll let you know. Well, actually, you’ll know because I’ll smell funny for a few hours. What I really liked about hair salon places is that, unlike barbers in my day, they didn’t discuss politics and sports and hunting and fishing and a thousand other things I have no interest in. They did gossip, but gossip is more like entertainment—more interesting than watching all that internet detritus. 

By the time you leave the joint, you look better than you really are.

What more could anybody ask?

Just asking

© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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THE GOOD TIMES BEFORE YESTERDAY

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The double-clasped wooden treasure box is practically invisible. It is invisible because it is in plain sight. I see it so often I no longer see it.

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But once every handful of years, the double-clasped wooden treasure box beckons, calls attention to itself, dares me to unclasp and lift the lid.

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Here I am this morning, doing just that.

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I already know what is inside the box, but gazing directly at the objects within refreshes my memory, teases me with snippets of childhood adventures.

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There, right on top of the box’s other contents, is a stack of Topps trading cards, squirreled away when I was eleven.

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No, these are not sports trading cards. They are trading cards designed for those of us who were useless on the playing fields of competition. These cards were made for us, the invisible unathletic unpopular clumsy-but-smart kids who maneuvered  through life by finding our own pleasures.

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My calisthenics included re-reading and memorizing the historical and biographical information on the back of each Topps Look ‘n See card.

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Back then, they were called bubble gum cards, packaged with a red cellophane decoder, a modest slab of pink barely-chewable gum, and a beautifully painted portrait of our heroes of the day, one per card per chaw per history lesson.

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Here are some of them right in front of me. Jules Verne, Sitting Bull, Jesse James, Cleopatra, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Washington Carver…and on and on. At the age of eleven I knew something about each of these and dozens more, long before we studied them in school.

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I could act smarter than I was, which was helpful to an otherwise unrenowned sub-teen who at the very least needed to spout off smart thoughts designed to impress others when they were not obsessively watching sports, participating in sports, and thumbing through their Topps sports cards.

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At least I knew who H.G. Wells and Mahatma Gandhi were, even if you didn’t.

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Cheap thrills for what we now call a Nerd.

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And another thing—these famous characters of history were on equal footing in my imagination. Francis Scott Key and Jefferson Davis and Ponce de Leon are worthy of attention, at least for 30 seconds each.

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Ironically, they rest inside the wooden box as compatriots. At least they no longer disagree or wage war or gripe.

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Oh, if you are worried that my childhood deprived me of the need to adore famous sports figures, just relax. There is one sportsman in the Topps collection, just one.

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Babe Ruth.

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In my eleven-year-old world Babe Ruth was worthy of attention. Not because of his considerable prowess, but because there was something magical about him. In the imaginations of us kids, Babe Ruth was mythological, the greatest icon of all. I have no idea why…he just was.

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There you have it. The confessions of a Topps Look ‘n See non-sports bubble gum trading card kid. A kid who has grown from wimpy sub-teen to become wimpy octogenarian.

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An overgrown kid who still dreams of picking up a wooden stick, pointing to a certain part of a crowd-filled stadium, and whapping a homer right on target

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 © Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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TO TELL THE TOOTH

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THSHTH! THSHTH!

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Let me get this as right as I can…it’s difficult to spell the sound that my father used to make whenever he was caught without a toothpick.

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You’ll just have to get me to make that sound for you next time we meet, because THSHTH! is as close as I can come to reproducing it. That sound occurs when you suck air between two adjacent teeth in your mouth, but only when that space between those teeth has a food particle that needs to be cleared away.

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When my father made the THSHTH! sound, we knew he was feeling satisfied, that he was sated from a good home-cooked meal. He’d be driving along on the way to visit my Uncle Pat McGee in Peterson, Alabama, and I’d be in the front seat. In the rear seat would be my brother Tim. Every time my father made the THSHTH! sound, Tim would loudly imitate it.

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To this day, I don’t know whether Dad was so used to making the sound that he didn’t know he was being mocked, or whether he was the most tolerant man in the universe. Any ordinary person might have pulled off the side of the road and popped Tim one, but Dad just refused to acknowledge Tim’s noises.

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This, of course, just egged Tim on. He’d do additional things in the back seat, such as imitate the expressions and comments that our neighbor Edgar Beatty would come out with. He mimicked phrases that Uncle Adron Herrin used—in exact imitation, by the way. I never was good at imitations, so to this day I marvel at Tim’s uncanny ability to create humor out of just about anything he finds funny or scary.

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All through the years, I stop short when anybody around me makes anything like that THSHTH! noise—and, of course, lots of people do.

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Everybody seems to have their little sounds and oral punctuations that unconsciously pop out. Hums, sighs, whistles, grunts, tooth-clicking, neck-cricking, tsking, snorting, groaning, hacking, swallowing loudly, lip-popping, gurgling, sneezing, throat-clearing, sinus-blowing, whispering, muttering, and on and on.

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Wouldn’t it be horribly wonderful if we could get a group of people together, willing to reproduce their own personally-developed sounds, and perform some sort of symphony? A noisy pantomime representing all the daily little ejections of delight and frustration that emanate from us, all the little and big wordless pronouncements…we could perform them in such a way that the listener will be able to hear and appreciate—and even understand—the import and usefulness of these silly tiny things we utter.

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Those THSHTH! sounds my father made had great meaning and significance in our little neighborhood, and we the family could no more have done without them than without food.

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We silently knew those sounds were the assurances we received each day that for a few ticks in time, the head of the family was satisfied and happy with the moment, and, thus, so were we

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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AN ARMORY OF HAND-MADE QUILTS

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A childhood memory…

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I am as safe and snug as any kid could ever be.

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I know I am safe and secure because my body weighs twice as much as normal at this moment.

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My body is so heavy because it is covered with massively layered hand-made quilts and coverlets and sheets and blankets. I am immobile beneath these sweet-smelling shields, lying atop a padded mattress in the small bedroom of youth.

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The night is icy cold, but I am safe. That’s about all that matters at the moment.

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I have been lovingly hugged and tucked in, a Woody Woodpecker night light secures the perimeter, a Treasure Island comic book hides beneath the mattress next to a camouflage-green Boy Scout flashlight. In case of insomnia, be prepared.

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I feel cozy and burrowed. I take for granted the care and nurturing of family. I assume tonight is going to spawn forever nights like this. I presume immortality.

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This cocooned moment makes me feel nothing bad can possibly happen. It’s as though the universe is wrapped around me, making its limits clear. There is no way I can fall out of bed, blow away in a storm, no way I can become untethered.

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Now and then, throughout life, I recall this momentary feeling. If only I could carry this assuredness, this bravery, with me. I could strut with confidence, brush aside doubts and demons, pass along this bluster to others, become some kind of kindly example.

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I hold fast to memories like this because sometimes they are the only grab bars I can depend on.

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I need to be prepared for days when I forget how safe I felt that night beneath the gentle armor of love and quilting

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 © Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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ONLY ONE PERCHANCE PER DREAM, PLEASE

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How would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?

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Long, long ago we Down South village playmates used to dream about doing things like star-swinging and moonbeam-toting.

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Dreams were our main source of entertainment. We daydreamed, night dreamed, imagined the impossible, explored the corners of the universe without moving an inch.

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Grownups respected our outrageous imaginations. They couldn’t ground us for thinking and dreaming, so they let us run wild inside.

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After all, they were kids like us just a couple of decades earlier.

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Grownups even understood that dreams could become nightmares at times. They were there to comfort us in the feverish wee hours of the morning.

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One nightmare:

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Cold steel-blue flames are swooping over a field across the street from our home, the field we play in each day.

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But in this nervous dream the fire does not produce heat. I am in the field, running through those cold steel-blue flames, trying to escape. But escape from what? Escape to where? How will I know when I’m safe from the flames? Since the flames are harmless, why am I running from them? Should I stop and embrace the flames, respect the flames, learn to live within the flames?

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I am panicky. I scream.

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I awaken to the humid world into which I was delivered just a few years ago.

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Cool hands check my brow. Large loving adults soothe me and tuck me in.

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My unfettered imagination is once again safely anchored, allowing me time to recuperate and prepare for capturing future moonbeams in jars.

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The moonbeams become fireflies, so I release them back to their world after a while. After all, they were here long before me. They will be here long after I myself become a dream.

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Maybe by then I’ll learn how to swing on a star

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Listen:  https://youtu.be/pHvB7Wde1g8

Life, actually…

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TO BE YOUNG  AND SMALL AND SWEET

AND DANCING ON AIR ONCE MORE

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The petite bookstore visitor pauses and stares and vibrates before a tall stack of previous-century volumes that await shelving.

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She delicately touches textured spines, at the same time swaying slightly to the gentle jazz emanating from an old record player behind the books.

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She does not notice whether she’s keeping time with the books or the music. They both seem the same to her.

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She dances in-place, unnoticed by surrounding elsewhere-entranced browsers. She is noticed only by the shop owner who glances up from his work now and then to see whether she is remaining in the moment.

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A glimpse later and she’s gone, absorbed by the aisles of paginated lives once lived, lives now ambered within time capsules.

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Another customer leans against tall shelving, intensely examining each and every page of a title she is considering. Yet another peruser lies afloor on his side, closely thumbing through bottom rows of old brittle 78rpm recordings, recordings he must and will own before exiting onto sunny streets.

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Visitors arrive and wonder and leave, some alone, others in clusters, still others in a daze. Some know they’ve experienced a living distant past. Some are clueless but marveling at what they have experienced. Some are along for the ride, not sure what they just missed.

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The shop owner plies his trade with a silent smile, grateful for this small life among dreamers and their books. He wishes each purchase a long and respected existence, he wishes each purchaser a long and respected existence.

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And later, when he closes up for the day, he will retire to his ancient home to write down his memories, dreams, reflections…and will dare to share some of them with you

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Listen to podcast: https://youtu.be/G1lx86IxBpU

Life, actually…

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ALIENS AND EARTHLINGS FINALLY COMMUNICATE

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Wading through the crises of the world right now, it helps me find my balance when I remember there were other times, other crises…way, way back. Entries from my long-ago Red Clay Diary:

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The grey haired man and his wife wander attentively through the stacks of books and paper that are displayed in the Museum of Fond Memories.

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They’ve never been here before, but they are excited to find a quiet haven, surrounded by five centuries of artifacts and books, the kinds of artifacts and books that are lost to them forever in their storm—ravaged hometown, New Orleans.

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They are staying with friends in Alabama. They don’t know whether they have a home to return to.

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A rough-edged woman shows up at the shop, talking energetically about the old books and magazines she’s trying to sell to me. She’s getting rid of her possessions so she can trek southward to spend her life helping victims of Katrina. She’s had an epiphany but doesn’t know what an epiphany is.

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Larry at the local hotel tells me stories about refugees he’s housing, Teresa of the Downtown security force pleads for aid for all displaced evacuees sheltered at the nearby civic center. My friend Beth is lying in the neighborhood hospital, donating a kidney to her friend. Daughter Margaret sends a note that her church in Lower Alabama has turned itself into a soup kitchen, that thousands are being helped throughout her village. Suburban dwellers say they still don’t have electrical service, but they don’t seem to be complaining or whining.

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I recall the day after 9/11, when son-in-law Derek walked into his home near the coast with a funny look on his face. He told Margaret, “They didn’t turn the trashcans over this time. And they even replaced the lids,” referring to city workers who usually tossed things about in the rush to get things done. They, too, acted not quite as abruptly as usual, treating customers with respect and kindness.

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Every few minutes, I run into more anecdotes and stories about post-Katrina, post-9/11 times. Despite the horrors, many people are being respectful of one another, and respectfully quiet now and then.

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One of my favorite movie scenes drifts into full view in my mind. In the film STARMAN, an enthusiastic and frustrated scientist is desperately attempting to communicate with a superior-intelligenced alien. The scientist is trying to learn all he can before vivisectionists arrive to enslave and examine this stranger, just in case he presents a threat to Earthlings.

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And then, a great cinematic moment occurs.

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Scientist and alien are sitting face to face, just before all Bureaucracy  breaks loose.

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In reply to the scientist’s obvious question, “Why are you here?” the dying alien say, “We are interested in your species. You are a strange species…not like any other…and you would be surprised how many there are in the Universe…intelligent but savage.”

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The scientist is hanging on to every word during this first-ever conversation between planets.

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The alien asks, “Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you (Earthlings)?”

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The scientist can only nod.

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“You are at your very best when things are worst.”

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And that’s the scene.

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It’s the kind of thing you don’t think about too much on a conscious level, but by and by the significance begins to sink in. The metaphor applies. The soul takes a turn for the better.

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We are at our very best when things are worst.

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I look around me at the changed people, the changed lives, the refugees of 9/11 and Katrina and Hiroshima and Tsunami and a thousand other catastrophes human-made or human-preventable or human-unpreventable. I see the good that people do lives after them. The bad is interred with their bones.

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Sorry about paraphrasing you, Mark Antony, but you got it wrong. Most people are capable of great kindnesses, especially when they are not prepared to resist their gentle impulses.

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Look around you. You’ll see small kindnesses everywhere.

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Like the Starman, you will wonder at the mistakes and vanities, but you will think we’re all worth saving, once you see how we react when times are worst

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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Life, actually…

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LOOKING AHEAD TO THE PAST

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This is a good day to gaze into my crystal ball, that archive that thrives within my memories.

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Yep, just like you, I have a head full of memories both good and bad, glad and sad, hopeful and iffy. This hidden crystal ball, this archive of Me, serves me well at times.

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There is always a more pleasurable time at the fingertip, ready to spring into wistful life and provide me with a positive charge when most needed.

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That reservoir of fond memories prods me with questions—what is a smile worth? What is the value of a secret laugh? What will be the final humorous thought that crosses my mind? If some day I gotta go, wouldn’t I prefer to be wearing a mysterious smirk to perplex the undertaker? Wouldn’t a puzzling grin cause friends and enemies to wonder whether I knew something they don’t?

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Gazing into my archive reminds me there were good times, good times that did not occur merely to lie fallow and fade. Those good times are at the ready, awaiting my command, my password.

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What was my past pleasure? Where did it happen? When? How did it feel, taste, sound?

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Was it simple—lying on my back in a childhood back yard, looking at clouds and trying to animate scenes and stories from them?

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Was it complicated—like acing an exam I thought I would never live through?

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Was it secret—something I saw that gave me great pleasure…my little secret between me and myself?

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Or was it a guilty pleasure, one I may share with an old friend someday, or was it something I’ve never really done but always enjoy thinking about doing?

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Whatever.

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Fond memory does not have to be complicated. I can recall what a carnival smells like, what a meadow feels like under bare feet, what a chrome trim looks like in the bright sun, what the first-ever kiss felt like from the first-ever love in my life, what the kiss of my mother felt like when I was three years old and accepting all loving gestures.

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I can utilize my archived fond memories any time. There are more than I can possibly call up on a lifetime. They are there to be replayed, freeze-framed, fast forwarded, slo-moed, cherished.

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And to heck with all those archived bad memories. They are not worth the effort—unless there was something nice and kind to remember or re-think in the midst of all that grimness

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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