DID I EVER TELL YOU WHAT TO GET ME FOR CHRISTMAS?

http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/tell.mp3

Click above to listen…click below to read.

If you really want to please me, if you truly wish to give me something that will make me smile, if you want to feel you’ve done the right thing by me, then read on:

This Christmas, give me something personal, something of yourself–not something you picked up at the Mall or ran into the Pharmacy and grabbed at the last minute. Just this one Christmas, I would love to receive something truly personal, something that is part of you.

The gift you give as a part of yourself could be any number of things.

You could write a little poem for me, one you made up all by yourself.

You could sing me your favorite Christmas carols, the ones you’ve loved since childhood.

You could do a little performance for me–a funny jig or a joke or two about what it’s like to know somebody like me.

You could draw me a picture and sign your name at the bottom and date it, “Christmas, The 21st Century A.D.”

You could take me to dinner all by yourself and sit and chat with me over some nice food and drink, I listening to what you have to say and you listening to what I have to say.

You could make a little album of photos and memorabilia about me and you, and give it to me with a loving hug.

Get the idea?

You may come up with something better or something more interesting than any of these–that’s ok. As long as you give me something personal, something affectionate and caring, I will be happy.

Maybe you feel uncomfortable, trying to improvise a Christmas gift for me. Perhaps you’ve gotten used to going to the store and purchasing something, and maybe you feel this IS a personal way to gift me. If that’s so, then here’s something you can try, something that may please us both: Go to the store and find a delightful little toy, a toy that makes you smile, involuntarily. Then, bring me that smile–and the toy, too. We can enjoy the toy and our mutual smiles together at the same time!

If all of this is just too much trouble, you could even do this: take me to lunch and ask me what I’d like to give to you, if I could only afford it or if I could only do it just right, in a way that you would appreciate.

Anyhow, I thought you might get a kick out of learning the answer to that age-old question we all ask each other every year: “What do you want for Christmas?” This year, I thought I’d tell you the truth, as I feel the truth this year.

Give me part of you, and I will try to return the compliment next Christmas

–Jim Reed (c) 2009 A.D.

www.jimreedbooks.com

SAVING THE HARLEM REINDEER DREAM 

Harlem Reindeer

(Read below or click audio above.)

My first visit to Harlem to visit Oliver Hardy was just a few years back, but I can’t forget it.

Let me back-track.

I’m driving the long and barren interstate between Augusta and Atlanta in the dead of winter. The sky is gray, the asphalt is gray, the grass and trees are gray, and the mood is grayish. My wife, Liz, and my granddaughter, Jessica, are with me. Suddenly I see a roadside sign directing me to Harlem, Georgia.

Interesting. There is a Harlem Down South?

Then, the next sign tells me that Harlem is the birthplace of the late film comedian Oliver Hardy, of Laurel and Hardy fame.

This is my chance to break the gray day into something smileful. Without asking anybody’s permission, I swerve onto the road to Harlem.

“Where are we going?” Liz asks.

“Why are we turning?” Jessica asks. She’s in a hurry to get to Columbia, South Carolina, to visit family.

“Oh, I’m just going to check something out,” I say. “Maybe we’ll have fun!”

Both passengers grumble and try to go back to their naps.

Suddenly, I’m yelling, “Look look look!” rapid-fire, to make sure Liz and Jessica wake up and look ahead of us on the two-lane blue road.

There, half a block away, five deer are crossing the road, and Jessica claps her hands in delight,

“Are they reindeer?”

I make my usual retort, “Maybe this is where Santa keeps his reindeer off-season.” Jessica is still young and hopeful and a Believer, so she accepts this explanation without a hint of cynicism.

We drive on in to Harlem, the gray day broken by smiles and daydreams.

Harlem is a tiny town, but, sure enough, it’s the hometown of Oliver Hardy. Nothing is open today, since it’s Sunday, and this is long before the Laurel and Hardy museum is fully functioning.

We visit for a while, find that some locals don’t know who Hardy was, find that others are proud of who he was. Liz and I enjoy the visit, but Jessica doesn’t know who these comedians were, so she’s just along for the ride, still thinking about those five reindeer.

Years later, when Harlem has its act together, I take grandsons Ryan and Reed to Harlem, and they get to see a Laurel and Hardy movie, which makes them instant fans.

But today, driving out of Harlem and heading back to the interstate, Jessica starts to settle down in the back seat and Liz closes her eyes while I drive.

Once on the interstate, I’m driving along at my usual at-the-speed-limit rate when I see in the rearview mirror a truck bearing down on us and getting ready to pass. The large open bed of the truck has something gray piled onto it, so I glance again, as it starts to pass us, to determine what it is hauling.

Two hunting-capped men are in front and in the bed are five fresh deer carcasses, their antlers waving with the truck’s motion.

Since they’re passing on the left, I quickly yell, “Look over there! (pointing to the right-hand fields) What’s that? Do you see that?”

Liz and Jessica rise up and peer to the right, their attention focused intensely, just as the truckload of deer passes on by. I keep making up stuff to keep them searching the fields, until the truck is out of sight. Then, I have to fabricate something so they won’t think I’m completely crazy.

“I thought I saw a grizzly!”

They look at me funny and settle back down, never having seen the truck.

And I continue the drive toward Augusta, slightly proud of myself for having saved one little girl’s dream of Santa for at least another season

–Jim Reed © 2009 A.D.

GRASSHOPPER GROWS UP

Once when I was oh so young, a vizier came to me.

He first was coy, was but a boy, but said he’d set me free.

He stood by while I cried my fear, he let me show my ache;

And when I dared to act real brave, he’d give my hand a shake.

I grew up and went my way, but wondered who he was,

This vizier who cared for me and let me find my cause.

One day as I was feeling whole and pure and fine and proud,

I glanced into a mirror…exclaimed in awe aloud,

And waved at my now old vizier, who carried me through life;

And puzzled how he’d known that I could deal with all life’s strife.

This vizier boy, now vizier man, had known it all along,

Known that I would catch up, catch on, sing my own sweet song.

Now that I am oh so old, my vizier stays with me.

He lives within my mirror and waits there patiently,

Making faces when I’m sad, winking when I’m glad,

And seeing what I am and was—just a star-struck lad,

Wryly helping mark my time, slow to criticize,

And always looking straight at me through my own star-struck eyes

© 2009 A.D. Jim Reed

*

THANKSGIVING: THE HAPPIEST SAD DAY OF THE YEAR

The saddest thing I ever saw: a small, elderly woman dining alone at Morrison’s Cafeteria, on Thanksgiving Day.

*

Oh there are many other sadnesses you can find if you look hard enough, in this variegated world of ours, but a little old lady dining alone on Thanksgiving Day makes you feel really fortunate, guilty, smug, relieved, tearful, grateful…it brings you up short and makes you time-travel to the pockets of joy and cheer you experienced in earlier days.

*

Crepe paper. Lots of crepe paper. And construction paper. Bunches of different-colored construction paper. In my childhood home in Tuscaloosa, my Thanksgiving Mother always made sure we creative and restless kids had all the cardboard, scratch paper, partly-used tablets, corrugated surfaces, unused napkins, backs of cancelled checks, rough brown paper from disassembled grocery bags, backs of advertising letters and flyers…anything at all that

we could use to make things.

*

Yes, dear 21^st-Century young’uns, we kids back then made things

from scraps.

*

We could cut up all we wanted, and cut up we did.

*

We cut out rough rectangular sheets from stiff black wrapping paper and glued the edges together to make Pilgrim hats. Old belt buckles were tied to our shoelaces—we never could get it straight, whether the Pilgrims were Quakers, or vice versa, or neither. But it always seemed important to put buckles on our shoes and sandals, wear tubular hats and funny white paper collars, and craft weird-looking guns that flared out like trombones at one end. More fun than being a Pilgrim/Quaker was being an Indian—a true blue Native American, replete with bare chest, feathers shed by neighborhood doves, bows made of crooked twigs and kite string, arrows dulled at the tip by rubber stoppers and corks, and loads of Mother’s discarded rouge and powder and lipstick and mashed cranberries smeared here and there on face and body, to make us feel like the Indians we momentarily were.

*

Sister Barbara and Mother would find some long autumnal-hued dresses for the occasion, but they were seldom seen outside the kitchen for hours on end, while the eight-course dinner was under construction.

*

There was always an accordion-fold crepe paper turkey centerpiece on display, hastily bought on sale at S.H. Kress, just after last year’s Thanksgiving season. It looked nothing like my Aunt Mattie’s turkeys in her West Blocton front yard. And for some reason, we ate cranberry products on that day and that day only. Nobody ever thought about cranberries the other 364 days!

*

And those lucky turkeys were lucky because nobody every thought of eating them except on Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were home free the rest of the year!

*

Now, back into the time machine of just a few years ago.

*

It is Thanksgiving Day. My wife and son and granddaughter are all out of the country. Other family and relatives are either dead or gone, or just plain tied up with their own lives in other states, doing things other than having Thanksgiving Dinner with me.

*

My brother, Tim, my friends Tim Baer and Don Henderson and I decide that we will have to spend Thanksgiving Dinner together, since each of us is bereft of wife or playmate or relative, this particular holiday this particular year.

*

So, we wind up at Morrison’s Cafeteria, eating alone together, going through the line and picking out steamed-particle-board turkey, canned cranberries, thin gravy, boxed mashed potatoes and some bakery goods whose source cannot easily be determined.

*

But we laugh at our situation and each other, tell jokes, cut up a bit, and thank our lucky stars that this one Thanksgiving Dinner is surely just a fluke. We’ll be trying that much harder, next year, to not get blind-sided by the best holiday of the year, Thanksgiving being the only holiday you don’t have to give gifts or reciprocate gifts or strain to find the correct gifts.

*

On Thanksgiving holidays ever since, I make sure I’m with family and friends, and now and then I try to set a place at the table of my mind, for any little old lady or lone friend who might want to join us, for the second saddest thing I’ve ever seen is a happy family lustily enjoying a Thanksgiving feast together and forgetting for a moment about all those lone diners in all the cafeterias of the world who could use a glance and a smile

*

(c) 2009 A.D. Jim Reed

HALLOWEEN IS NEVER OVER

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/scariest_stories1.mp3

or read his story below:

Once you’ve read the scariest books ever written, Halloween is never over, and you are never the same.

Now that the silly and frolicsome Day of the Living (the commercial free-for-all that Halloween has become) is done and gone, let’s contemplate some really scary stuff…the stuff that nightmares are made of.

The scariest book I ever read: CASTAWAY by James Gould Cozzens, published in 1934.

I don’t know why every teacher of literature, every writing instructor, isn’t assigning this book to students who are interested in really writing scary, writing well. This book leaves a lifetime impression and may even defy categorization. It could be called a horror story, though nothing really supernatural occurs. It could be called a dark fantasy, but there are no levitations or spells or exploding heads. It could be termed a remarkable work of avant-garde fiction, but nothing about it is pretentious. It might be a mystery, but it’s even hard to define what’s mysterious about it.

I won’t reveal more, because I want you to read it for yourself. Let’s just say it’s the story of a man trapped in a department store. Let’s just say it might be a re-telling of ROBINSON CRUSOE. Let’s just say it’s a survivalist tale, a morality tale.

Let’s just say it will stick with you.

The amazement of books such as this is that one short line can make you jump, can make your neck-hairs stand on end, can bring chills…

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So…here’s my list of the scariest books/stories ever written…and a tiny excerpt designed to make you cringe and read on…

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CASTAWAY by James Gould Cozzens

(“What he would do if he heard it, Mr. Lecky did not know. In despairing anticipation he feared to hear as much as he feared not hearing anything. To be pursued and know it was hardly better than to be pursued and not know it…”)

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DRACULA by Bram Stoker

(“As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not

repress a shudder…”)

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IT’S A GOOD LIFE by Jerome Bixby

(“Next day it snowed, and killed off half the crops–but it was a good

day.”)

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ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

(“…my only way to go about an attempt for an escape was,

if possible, to get a savage into my possession…”)

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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H.G. Wells

(“And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again,

and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.”)

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I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson

(“A coughing chuckle filled his throat.

He turned and leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills.

Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs.”)

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NIGHTMARE ALLEY by William Lindsay Gresham

(“How do you get to be a geek? I can’t understand how anybody can

get so low.”)

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OCTOBER GAME by Ray Bradbury

(“Then…some idiot turned on the lights.”)

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THE THIRTEEN CLOCKS by James Thurber

(“Even if you were the mighty Zorn of Zorna, you couldnot escape the fury of the Duke. He’ll slit you from your guggle to your zatch…”)

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–Jim Reed © 2009 A.D.

I am a hugger.

Not a mugger, not a lugger, not a slugger…but a hugger.

I generally keep my emotional and/or physical distance from strangers, but when I really like somebody, and when it’s safe to do so, I tend to greet them with a hug—or at least a handshake.

Over the decades, I’ve evolved. One of the few advantages of aging is that I now see patterns in things, cause-and-effect phenomena in things…so that my behavior has subtly shifted.

Some things I’ve learned about hugging:

1.  Some people respond readily to a quick hug and seem flushed with pleasure at this nice surprise.

2.  Some people respond but quickly back away, as if they don’t know what to do after a hug.

3.  Some people stiffen and don’t respond to the hug. These are folks I won’t hug again, unless they initiate.

4.  Some people back away and will do anything to avoid a hug in the first place.

5.  Some people hug a little too long and make me want to back away.

6.  Some people, at first reluctant at each hug, now approach me as if they will actually miss the hug if I don’t provide it.

7.  Some guys are huggable, but others try to avoid it because, well, they don’t think it’s guyish. These are often older or elderly guys, whose generation doesn’t cater to this kind of behavior.

8.  Some people exude a kind of sensuousness when I hug them, so I tend not to try to hug them again, lest something happens. This used to occur a lot more when I was young…with sometimes pleasant results. No more—I’ve been happily monogamous for more than three decades.

Even after studying hugging for sixty years, I still don’t know why most huggers pat each other on the back.  Maybe it’s a kind of sign language that says, “Just hugging! Nothing more is meant!”

Anyhow, there’s lots of horror and sorrow and grief in the world that’s beyond my control. Maybe hugging is something I can do that reminds me that people can be pleasant to one another, even when they can’t think of anything comforting to say aloud

© Jim Reed 2009 A.D.

www.jimreedbooks.com

THOUGHTS WORTH HAVING

Question: Does the Universe comprise a series of acts by an absentee god?

Question: When we congratulate a winner, are we glad the winner is glad but at the

                 same time jealous and resentful?

Question: Is the product Harris Famous Roach Tablets marketed solely to famous

                  roaches? Archie was one famous roach, but I don’t recall any others. Or

                  are the tablets themselves famous, and marketed to people who want to

                  kill unknown roaches?

Question: Is a trash can actually a time capsule? A receptacle of memories?

Question: How do graduates of the DUI School celebrate?

Question: In the film The Sky’s the Limit, Fred Astaire gets to dance on a bar and

                  angrily kick glasses to pieces. The song is One More for the Road. How

                  come I can’t get away with doing that?

Question: I think I’d like to be a medium fish in an insignificant pond. Wait! Isn’t               

                  that what I  am?

Question: An optimist sees the glass as half full. What is a person who sees the glass and wants to know who drank half the water?

Question: Is it true that deceased Veterans didn’t die for me, they just died instead of me

–Jim Reed © 2009 A.D.

WE LOOK BEFORE AND AFTER, AND PINE FOR WHAT IS NOT

Just behind me, hanging from the 103-year-old mantel of our 103-year-old home, is a passel of eyeglasses.

These eyeglasses are gathered there for the temporary distraction or pleasure or horror of anyone who cares to try them on or watch somebody try them on.

Come into our dining room/writing room/art room and take a look at the world through these eyeglasses…or let the world marvel at the new and altered you in the act of wearing these eyeglasses.  Let’s see…what glasses can I spot at this moment?

There are the Backwards Shades, a double-whammy of a young person’s dream—when you don these, nobody can see your eyes, so they don’t know what you’re looking at. But, more interesting than that is the bonus fact that the inside edges of the dark lenses are mirrored. That means you can see whatever is behind you, too! There are things you will enjoy spying when nobody knows you can see them, such as a quick smooch. There are things you are sorry you saw, such as somebody snickering or rolling their eyes at you.  It’s almost as good as that adolescent fantasy of turning invisible and being able to see people who can’t see you, or entering forbidden places undetected. These are cool glasses! And no batteries needed!

How nice to not only watch where you are going, but where you have been, all at the same moment.

Then, there are pairs of 3-D eyeglasses, both the polarized gray ones and the red-and-green ones. In my adulthood, I’ve spent much time viewing the Mars Rovers’ 3-D images direct from Mars…and in my early youth, I gazed in wonder at Wonder Woman’s bosom and Superman’s fists in 3-D comic books.

How nice to see a flat world suddenly have depth and perspective!

I wish somebody would invent 2-D glasses so that I could view people who get in my face as non-threatening and paper-thin.

Of course, I never know when to stop. I also own X-Ray Vision glasses (better wear your lead underwear when you visit!), nerd glasses, psychedelic glasses, rose-colored glasses, telescopic glasses, and even the dilated-pupil-protector glasses you get at the eye doctor’s.

Why is all this stuff around?

Maybe because reality is repetitive and sometimes needs a pick-me-up view.

Maybe because the limited world presented to me out of habit has many angles and details that can only be viewed by changing the spectrum a bit.

Maybe because it’s fun to see somebody giggle when they wear these things or see somebody else wear them.

Maybe just because I’m the one who needs to giggle once in a while, just to get outside my pink, wrinkled body bag and take an oblique look at an all-too-real world

© Jim Reed 2009 A.D.