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RED CLAY STORIES BY JIM REED

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JIM'S LATEST RED CLAY DIARY ENTRY:

FIRST, YOU DREAM

By Jim Reed

Carl Sandburg said it, and I’m glad somebody did:

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

What was that?

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

Carl Sandburg’s words keep haunting me as I go through the motions of getting ready for a New Year, a New Year that’s about to envelop us.

Ever since I met Carl Sandburg in Tuscaloosa, back in the late 1950’s, I’ve found pleasure and hope in his words. But today, driving down the grey streets of Alabama’s largest city, I’m reminded once again that great thoughts have incredible staying power, if only we will preserve them.

Anyhow, I’m driving past an intersection. On my left, a loft dweller is walking his large dog, pausing at the corner to wait for the traffic light, wait for a poop break. Coming toward the dog man is one of the city’s scruffy street people, a homeless panhandler who, along with dozens of others, works the avenues for cigarette butts and quarters. The dog man is about to be solicited, but for a brief diverting moment, the street guy loses his attention, forgets his spiel, his story about why the dog guy should give him money. He forgets because he sees the large dog and freezes. Maybe he’s afraid, I think to myself. But no, he is not afraid. Suddenly, he’s a younger, more dapper version of himself. He bends over the dog, places his ragged-gloved hands on each side of the pet’s head, and pets him in a gentle and warm manner, smiling ear to hear and talking with the animal as if he’s his best friend. The dog responds and the two have 25 seconds of bliss, looking into each others’ eyes, one panting while the other laughs. Then, as suddenly as it begins, the moment disappears, the dog man continuing his leashed walk, the street man putting on his best panhandling face and heading the other way on his daily rounds.

The observer man (me) continues driving by, feeling a bit warmer and remembering all those endless childhood summer days when he and his dog Brownie ran the streets of Tuscaloosa and knew they would live forever.

Is the 25-second-smile enough to sustain the homeless man, enough to make him remember a childhood dream pet, enough to make him feel life is worth living a few extra days, just to re-live wonderful old memories?

Is the dream of a better time enough to make the dog owner and the observer decide to do something besides dream, decide to make some extra effort for the homeless, give some extra time to nudging someone else toward a better life?

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

Thanks, Carl. Thanks, homeless guy. Thanks, dog man. Thanks, Dog and Brownie.

You’ve all provided me with the dream I need to make something happen

--Jim Reed

DAGWOOD FIXES BREAKFAST

by Jim Reed

First things first is what gets me through the morning ritual of preparing breakfast on Sunday morning. Breakfast usually comes late, since this is my sleeping-in day. Never been good at sleeping in, since my brain is always coming up with ideas and projects and guilts that I should be up and around and taking care of.

Anyhow, first things first. I descend the stairs to the hundred-year-old kitchen and begin the ritual--I should say, the ritual with variations, since it is boring, just doing things the same way all the time.

I pull clean coffeemaker parts out of the dishwasher and assemble them, making sure I dip caffeinated coffee into the little metal cup. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I am married to a world-class coffee drinker, and I’ve learned over a thirty-year period that they cannot be fooled. She will know whether I’ve filled that little metal cup with high-test or decaffeinated. My parents drink coffee, but we kids don’t. That’s because we really believe her when she tells us kids that drinking coffee will stunt our growth. The evidence is unarguable...Mother is right. I never achieve the height of a basketball player. Must have smelled too much of her coffee.

Once the brew is brewing and the milk is microwaving, I trot out to the yard to retrieve two newspapers, each hidden in creative places in bushes or behind bricks or in the street. The New York Time paper deliveryperson throws one way, the Birmingham News deliveryperson throws another way, and they get creative at times.

Once I strip the papers of their wet plastic covers and ouchy rubber bands, I’m ready to pour the coffee and deliver the papers upstairs to my wife, who is always grateful for the effort.

Then, it’s back downstairs to prepare breakfast...excuse me, to fix breakfast.

I pull out my favorite frying pan, pull a couple of jumbo eggs from the refrigerator (excuse me...ice box), crack the first one open with two hands, then, bored already, try to crack the second one with one hand, like I’ve seen it done in the movies by macho actors. The yolk leaps into the air, splattering itself half on the counter and half into the sink, at which point I thank my lucky stars that no-one is watching. I slide another egg out of the ice box and do it right this time, beating both eggs with a metal whisk thing. I pull forth a spatula...excuse me, the (Chinese-translated) label says it’s a NYLON COOKING TURNER. Now I see it in a new way. By the way, it is "ideal for non-stick surface." If the surface is truly non-stick, why would I need a spatula, er, NYLON COOKING TURNER?

Back when I am a kid, my job each evening is to clear off the dining table after everybody has eaten. I wait till Mother is in the kitchen, Daddy is reading the paper, and siblings Barbara and Ronny are doing their specific tasks (Ronny dries as Barbara washes), then I try to accomplish something my hero, Dagwood Bumstead, does so well. I try to clear the table in one trip. This requires stacking the dishes flat, placing aluminum utensils on top of the stack. With plates in one hand, I pile the serving dishes on the arm leading to the plate hand, place napkins and other detritus atop the plates, pick up five glasses in the other hand by sticking one finger in each glass and squeezing, and lifting anything else it is possible to lift in the crook of my elbow and under my arm. Sometimes, it actually works! A couple of times, everything comes crashing down, along with my sense of accomplishment. I now know why Mother started purchasing Melmac and other unbreakable dishes--if she is to have her kids do their chores, she’ll have to make it as safe and inexpensive as possible, since taking over all the chores herself is not an option, what with a new kid on the way.

While bacon is microwaving itself, I am heating up the skillet on the gas stove. Back when I am young, Mother’s gas stove has no pilot light--we have to strike a large wooden match and hold it to the gas burner until WHOOSH the fire appears. Then, I plop some butter--or what appears to be something that looks and smells like butter--into the heating pan. When I am young, our butter is oleomargarine that comes white and pasty in a sealed plastic bag with a red cherry-like dye in the middle. To make it look like butter, the bag has to be massaged till the dye spreads throughout, yellowing up the contents, as if this will fool us into thinking this is cow butter.

I drop some cheese bits into the cooking eggs and pull marmalade out of the ice box to spread on toast. When I am young, we can afford no toaster, so the sliced bread (lightbread to you) has to be placed inside the oven and checked constantly till browned. And the marmalade or jelly always comes in glasses that can be used later.

Soon, some semblance of breakfast is ready. Since this is Sunday, I take care to select eating utensils that are not scarred by traumatic encounters with the garbage disposal, and I take the plate up to a beaming wife, who cooks 98 percent of our other meals, and my good deed is done for the day. Then, because nobody is looking--I’m downstairs and she is upstairs--I get to try for Dagwood’s record again. The kitchen is cleaned in one swell foop. Blondie will never know!

Now, if only I could learn to take sofa naps like Dagwood. Unfortunately, my Mother didn’t believe in naps, and neither do I. There are so many other records left to break--such as making the largest Dagwood sandwich possible, or avoiding collisions with the letter carrier. I have achieved at least one Dagwood aspiration. I no longer have dictatorial bosses.

Now, if I can only find Dagwood a good job

DEAD PEOPLE NEED LOVE, TOO

What was I thinking? How could I be so fifty years selfish? And how many teachers the world wide have been ignored in the same manner?

I could have thanked her, you know.

I could have thanked Helen Hisey for being one of the best teachers in my known universe. I could have shown up one day at the retirement home and said, “Mrs. Hisey, thanks, thanks, thanks for making my life so bearable.” And I would really have meant it, too. Helen Hisey made me take a right-angle turn and sent me on my way down the fifty year road to this moment, the moment in which I feel comfortable enough to write down this little thought.

I’m standing in front of a classroom full of eighth grade students, students who are required to sit quietly and pay attention to me, the fellow eighth grader standing before them. I’m making my first speech in Helen Hisey’s speech class at Tuscaloosa Junior High School in 1954. I have nervously prepared for this moment, going over my three-by-five lined stiff note cards until I have them memorized…only I’m so nervous that I can’t get up enough confidence to depend upon memory, so, for lack of anything else to look at besides students, I stare down at the note cards and try to give a speech, utilizing all those rules that good speechmakers are supposed to follow: make good eye contact with the audience (not furtive glances, which is what I am producing), speak loudly (I’m projecting ok, since I was born with this Voice), be convincing (I’m convinced I’m going to expire prior to taking my seat), make appropriate gestures (I’m sure my hands are flailing about, if not in time with my spoken emphases), and be passionate about my subject (I am, I am…only I’m afraid to show it before an audience).

Helen Hisey’s wonderfully warn and slightly nasal non-southern voice gently interrupts my speech, “James, try slowing down a bit,” is what she says, but what she manages to mean is, “James, you’re doing fine, and I’m enjoying this so much that I would really like to see you enjoying it, too…so relax and tell me a good story.”

I KNOW that’s what she means, and that’s what makes her a great teacher. Helen Hisey never makes you think she doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and her kindly, business-like manner reinforces this idea.

From that moment on, I do fine in Mrs. Hisey’s class, because, like every other student, I just know she is in my corner. Later that year, she inspires me to write my first short story, entitled “The Fool,” and from then on, I am hooked on writing and telling stories to anyone who will listen or read. Subsequent teachers seldom encourage my writing, save for high school instructors Mr. Campbell and Mrs. Williams, so there are years of gaps, years when I write lots of words for other people—my bosses—but seldom write what I need to say. There are times I feel perhaps nothing I have ever written is worthy—did Mrs. Hisey tell me my story was good just to encourage me and fortify my self esteem?

I learn the answer to that question years later, when it is revealed that Helen Hisey had kept my story, “The Fool,” and read it aloud to every class for many years, using it as an example of a good tale well told by a writer willing to slow down and enjoy the ride.

When my first “respectable publishing house” book is released 45 years after Mrs. Hisey’s eighth grade speech class, it contains a dedication to her on the first page. When I call to arrange to present her with a signed copy of the book, ready to tell her how much she has affected my life, I learn that she has just died. My dedication and devotion are a little too late.

What would Helen Hisey have said about THAT?

I can hear her clear voice, “James, you never had to thank me. Watching you emerge was the greatest thanks. Don’t you know that’s what good teaching is all about?”

Whenever I speak to gatherings of five or five hundred, I never have a moment of fear. Because of Helen Hisey, I’ve learned to slow down and enjoy the ride. Like her, I have learned that if you are enjoying the ride, and if you show your audience that you are enjoying the ride, they, too, will enjoy it.

Doesn’t matter what your subject is, the audience is there waiting to be taken away to a world full of good teachers who only want their students to emerge as good and happy grownups

FIRST, YOU DREAM

By Jim Reed

Carl Sandburg said it, and I’m glad somebody did:

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

What was that?

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

Carl Sandburg’s words keep haunting me as I go through the motions of getting ready for a New Year, a New Year that’s about to envelop us.

The observer man (me) continues driving by, feeling a bit warmer and remembering all those endless childhood summer days when he and his dog Brownie raced the streets of Tuscaloosa and knew they would live forever.

Is the dream of a better time enough to make the dog owner and the observer decide to do something besides dream, decide to make some extra effort for the homeless, donate to some animal shelter, provide a kind word for a big-city loft dweller who dreams of picket fences, give some extra time to nudging someone else toward a better life?

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

Thanks, Carl. Thanks, homeless guy. Thanks, dog man. Thanks, Dog and Brownie.

You’ve all provided me with the dream I need to make something happen

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DEAD PEOPLE NEED LOVE, TOO

--Jim Reed

What was I thinking? How could I be so fifty years selfish? And how many teachers the world wide have been ignored in the same manner?

I could have thanked her, you know.

What would Helen Hisey have said about THAT?

I can hear her clear voice, “James, you never had to thank me. Watching you emerge was the greatest thanks. Don’t you know that’s what good teaching is all about?”

Doesn’t matter what your subject is, the audience is there waiting to be taken away to a world full of good teachers who only want their students to emerge as good and happy grownups

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THE DIAPERED CIGAR-SMOKING SOLDIER BOY TALKATHON

--Jim Reed

The small asbestos-shingled 2 ½-bedroom bungalow on Eastwood Avenue is still the hub of our universe, back here in 1954 or so—the hub of the family of Frances and Tommy Reed (my parents) and their kids, mainly, Barbara Jean, Ronny, Rosi, Tim and me. These days, our worldly holdings are still modest. About all we have is each other, so we make do with that for the time being.

Summer is a time we all still get stuck together within the same walls now and then, and this is one of those days. Later on, we find less and less time to joke around, our innocence being so fleeting, but today we are lucky. Here’s what’s happening:

One thing my older sister, Barbara, and my Mother, Frances, love to do more than anything you can name, is talk. I mean, really talk. And not to us younger kids, either. Barbara and Mother like to talk with each other. It’s a mystery that I can’t solve, even 50 years later, but these two can both talk non-stop in unending sentences about everything under the sun. They kind of feed off each other. Being a teenager, Barbara is excited and apprehensive about everything in her world, and, being an extrovert, likes to talk it out. Mother, still remembering how much fun and worry she herself had as a teenager, is eager to re-experience her life through Barbara as well as guide her past the potholes, should she stop talking long enough to listen.

It becomes a silent joke between Ronny and me, how Barbara and Mother, once they get to talking, are oblivious to everything and everyone around them. Barbara’s usual disdainful comment, whenever she notices that one of us underlings is trying to say something, is, “Oh, just don’t ignore them. They’re just trying to get attention!” When I hear her say this, I feel guilty for trying to get attention, like it’s a vanity or a sin or something, but years later, when infant Tim has become a full-grown adult, he puts me at ease by saying, “Yes, of course we were trying to get attention,” as if to say, “what’s wrong with that?” But right now, in 1954, I don’t have the benefit of Tim’s wisdom, since he’s a toddler walking around the un-air-conditioned house in a safety-pinned cloth diaper.

Whenever Ronny and I mention this talking thing to Barbara or Mother, they deny that they talk a lot or that they don’t know what’s going on around them when they talk.

So, Ronny and I one day decide to take some action to prove our claim.

My grandfather, Robert McGee, always smokes these great-smelling cigars, and when he visits, he usually leaves a few for my father to enjoy. My uncle Buddy McGee, a World War II hero, has left us his medals and military regalia, including his army cap. Ronny and I gather the cap and the cigar and a box of wooden matches and find toddler Tim in the kitchen, where we prepare him for the Big Talk Test. Barbara and Mother are in the living room, sitting at opposing walls, and chatting away. We hand the cigar to Tim, who gladly places it in his mouth, mimicking his father and grandfather. We place the army cap on Tim’s head, which delights him, since he’s usually not allowed to play with our toys.

Then, we light the cigar and make sure it’s puffing plenty of smoke. The deed is done, then. All we have to do is tell Tim to walk across the living room, between Mother and Barbara, and into the den, on the pretense of fetching something for us. Tim obliges and toddles straight across the hardwood floor, cigar in mouth and soldier cap on head, diaper hitched up safely and bare feet padding softly.

Nothing happens. Not only do my sister and mother not miss a beat in their excited conversation, they don’t even look down to see Tim. We know this, because we’re peeking around the plaster wall to watch the action.

The experiment is a success, but we haven’t created the commotion we hoped for. Later, we tell Barbara and Mother what we did, but they don’t believe us. “Oh, you’re just trying to get attention,” Barbara says.

Yes, we are. And I guess we’ll always be doing that, Ronny and me, only this time we are joined as adults by sister Rosi and brother Tim. The attention and attentions of Barbara and Mother will always be in demand. Mother’s been gone ten years now, but Barbara has taken up the slack and talks to us, her kids and grandkids as much as ever, only now, we’re all grown up enough to know that what she’s talking about is important.

And maybe sometimes we wish we had a lot worth talking about, too.

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RED LADY REIGNS OVER THIRD AVENUE

--Jim Reed

I’m walking beside Brian’s truck, which is moving slower than I am, so I have to adjust my pace to stay with it. I’m holding the face of the Red Lady, and Doug, squatting on the bed of the truck, is holding her lower torso so it won’t tilt over.

The Red Lady is life-size and made of plaster, so she’s quite heavy. Her flowing skirt and tilted hat are constantly in motion, since she’s eternally walking, strutting, while standing still.

Brian and Doug and I are attempting to transport the Red Lady from the former First Avenue South location of Reed Books, to the new site on Third Avenue North. The Lady has to ride standing up, sans seat belt, since she’d crack to pieces were we to lay her on her side. The reason we’re tilting her is, this low-overhead slab of concrete is another potential hazard to her health.

Lots of yelling back and forth between Doug and Brian and me, but not a peep out of the Red Lady, until we are safely past the barrier and she can be uprighted again. The rest of the trip is smooth. Doug remains in the truck to hold the Red Lady stable, and I follow in my automobile to watch the trio and the truck and the people who see this minuscule parade in Downtown Birmingham.

The Red Lady has quite a history. She was abandoned on First Avenue North years ago when artists no longer had any use for her. I rescued her, much to the chagrin of family and friends, who thought she should be tossed away. Over the years, she stood at Reed Books and held various toys and games, but very few people even commented on her presence. I finally found out how she came into existence when sculptor Branko Medenica saw her and confessed that she was the creation of Jim Neal and himself. Finally, when the contents of Reed Books was being shuffled around and prepared for the Big Move, the Red Lady was tossed aside and broken, her hat in shards and her fingers splintered.

I couldn’t part with her, so, to the rescue, came doll-repair expert Margaret Stefanson, who lovingly conducted plaster surgery and made the Red Lady good as new.

Now, at last, people are beginning to notice her. And, finally, she is resting exactly where she should have been all these years—in the show window of Reed Books, overlooking the hustle of Third Avenue North. She is in good company, with such companions as a giant Piggly Wiggly mascot, a metal playground rubber duckie, a preacher’s pulpit chair, a defused rocket-shaped bomb, a David Janssen “Wanted” poster, a picture of Jelly Roll Morton, a set of scales, and who knows what else. I’m happy with this merry jumble, and I hope the Red Lady is happy, now that she knows she’s loved and cared for and free to strut unmolested on the streets of Birmingham.

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AIN’T NO CRACKHEADS

AIN’T NO CRACKED HEADS

UP HERE OR DOWN HERE!

by Jim Reed (www.jimreedbooks.com)

Every day is Tall Tale Day in Mister Reed’s Neighborhood.

I’m talking about all those The Glass Is Half Empty/The Glass Is Half Full stories that I listen to, here on 20th Street in Uptown/Downtown Birmingham, Alabama. These are stories about Birmingham and Downtown and Uptown, and they’re all a fun and sometimes disturbing mixture of urban mythology, high expectations, observation, low expectations, and a healthy salting of real stuff.

A rough-hewn woman with a tattoo (we’re talking Sailor-biker bar type of tattoo, not suburban I-gotta-have-one-because-it’s- in tattoo) says to me, “I wanted to make sure there’s a place to park Down Here (Down Here being Uptown Downtown), cause of the, you know, the stuff.” Playing naïve, I say, “What do you mean, the stuff?” and she says, “Well, I don’t want no crackhead jumping me,” to which I reply, “Oh, you must mean the homeless panhandlers—don’t worry about them, they’re harmless…and besides, I’m more scared to walk around in the Galleria parking lot at night than I’ve ever been, walking around Downtown at night.” I just have to rub it in and get my commercial in—quickly, before she disappears.

“Oh, yeah?” she says and kind of drops the subject, only she’s still in a hurry to hit the road. She only lingers because Reed Books/The Museum of Fond Memories is so damned fascinating to the uninitiated.

Earlier, a between-flight flight attendant comes into the shop for the first time, beaming ear to ear. After she’s stayed a while, she volunteers, “Birmingham is one of my favorite cities!” This is the kind of day when I need to hear something good, so I urge her to say more. “Well, my favorite restaurant in the whole world is here, the streets are clean, the air is nice, the people are real friendly, and I feel so safe, walking around and taking the Dart.”

I just soak all this in, because it’s got to tide me over during the next three stories I will hear about how run-down or corrupt or ugly the city is.

I know it’s not true, you know it’s not true, but it’s almost frightening how many people mouth off about Uptown Downtown without actually ever having spent a few hours touring and shopping and eating and just talking with people.

Mister Reed’s Neighborhood is either half-full or brimful of goodness, or it’s half-full or brimful of badness. Why is this so? Is it a matter of who’s doing the observing? Are both factoids true simultaneously?

Or should we simply go around, aggressively telling the good, the great, half-full-of-goodness stories, until they become contagious?

Bishop Spong once said that each city is as good or as bad as you expect it to be.

Was he right?

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ALABAMA STATE OF MIND

--Jim Reed

Alabama is a state of mind.

No, I take that back.

Alabama is your state of mind.

Alabama is my state of mind.

Look at the map.

There is no logical border.

If logic prevailed, Alabama would be panhandled-with-care to the Gulf and barely miss the Mississippi to the west and stick-toed in the Atlantic to the east.

...

The Alabama state of my mind is:

...

Alabama is a truncated

Arbitrarily-bordered

Mixture of Appalachian

Foothills and Gulf beaches

And Tennessean

Valleys and Southern

Pines and black dirt

Flatlands and red

Clay banks and

Human-formed mounds

And dinosaur-chalked

Banks and ‘gator

Swamps and

Cricks and meandering-barged rivers

And angel-haired falls and bluebird

Nests and mosquito bites

And chigger itches and ancient

Warrior-ghosts and

Dirt-poor moonshiners

And proud farmers and

Vegetable-stand pickups

And blue highways

And washboard roads

And scorching sun and

Humid rashes and

Fields endless fields

And full moon-activated

Cemeteries and

Tombstone graveyards and

Midwife shacks and

Breezeways and clapboards

And wild blackberries and lazy

Cows cud-ding and calves

Cuddling and hay bales and

Barn lofts and suckling puppies

And strutting blue roosters

And water moccasins

And synchronized

Twilight fireflies and glistening

Stars so close you can

Touch them.

... ...

Alabama in my state of mind is

Far-off 3:00 A.M. train

Whistles and howling dogs

And skittish deer and roadside

Tire carcasses and skulking

Buzzards and dearly departed

Armadillos and skunk-fragranced

Air blended with sweet honeysuckle and smothered

With kudzu and life-saving

Breezes interspersed with

Gasping-for-air heat.

...

Alabama in my state of mind is

At her best

When you close your eyes

And remember how

Good she was when you

Were young, how wise

She became as you yourself

Wised up and how good she

Could be if only she

Would re-claim her fairness

Of spirit, if only she

Would get back to

The earth, get back

Down to earth,

Remember her hard-working

Closely-tied families.

...

In my state-of-Alabama-mind,

Alabama is at her best

When she’s all potential and

Hope and strut…at her

Best when she remembers

Her humble beginnings…

At her best when she

Gives up the chanting

And pays attention to

The pups and babies and the infirm and

Poor…at her best when

She recalls how wonderful

It is to be paid tender attention to,

To be paid with tender attention

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ZEN AND THE SOUND OF ONE STYROFOAM CUP

by Jim Reed

How to torture an otherwise calm and balanced junior executive: carefully, slowly, meticulously disassemble one styrofoam cup. They can’t arrest you for this, but you can exact revenge on just about anybody you don’t like, through the simple act of using the weapons at hand, Grasshopper.

Way back when, I worked in a mythic kingdom named ExecutiveLand. It was in ExecutiveLand that I learned the finest forms of guerilla warfare...a type of warfare that can bring strong grownups to their knees. I learned this fine skill from another executive, Hamp Swann. Now, Hamp Swann was a true scientist, an engineer who really knew things, as opposed to executives like me, who knew very little but pretended to know a whole lot.

Hamp and I used to have to attend these regular management meetings called the AEC (administrative executive committee) at ExecutiveLand. These were really boring meetings, because they consisted of a group of leaders telling each other how carefully they planned and executed things that always succeeded--whether or not they really succeeded, and whether or not they actually spent any time planning them. Kind of like cabinet meetings.

Anyhow, most of us who had very little power would find ways to survive these meetings--we’d look alert but would be largely brain-inert, since we didn’t really care what went on. We were the realists--we knew that no matter how many meetings were held, the chief executive officers of ExecutiveLand never varied from their actions (They would tell us we were conducting participatory administrative activities, but invariably they’d wind up doing exactly what they intended to do before receiving our input...they’d do this because they could do it.)!

Anyhow, we juniors would play little games with one another to keep from falling asleep or bursting into tears or jumping across the large meeting table to strangle somebody. This was our therapy. Hamp Swann didn’t play these games because he was a truly independent thinker and did not need our ideas to figure out what the right thing to do was. One day, Hamp, looking intensely interested in the goings-on of the meeting, began dismantling a styrofoam coffee cup. There are many ways to accomplish this task, but Hamp’s method was simple: he started at the rim of the empty cup and slowly separated the foam into one continuous strip, the way you’d peel an apple. This is a very noisy procedure, particularly noisy in a solemn room of solemn senior executives who hope that all the juniors are acting solemn and hanging on to their every word in silent adulation.

Screeckkk...screeckkk...screeckk...the styrofoam noise slowly infiltrated the subconscious and unconscious people in the room. At first, the screeckkk wasn’t noticed, because all the seniors were so self-involved and all the juniors were trying to stay awake, but eventually, the screeckkk started making people uncomfortable. Hamp was dismantling the cup absent-mindedly, so he didn’t even know it was making a sound, plus it was in his lap, so nobody knew where the sound was coming from.

Screeckkk...screeckkk...screeckkk. Now, people were looking around for the source, each person still not knowing whether anybody else was hearing the same thing. One executive adjusted his hearing aid, just in case it was static. Another shifted in his chair to see whether it needed oiling, yet another looked nervously at the ceiling insulation to see if an insect or rodent had been self-invited.

Then, there were the other juniors like me. I found this event to be the most entertaining one I’d experienced in years, so I started yearning for popcorn, since I can’t watch a movie without someting buttery and salty and crunchy in my mouth.

I won’t tell you the ending of this story--you’ll just have to ask me. All I know is, the Great Styrofoam Cup Dismantling Caper has stayed in my memory for decades, and nothing, but nothing, about the intended content of that solemn meeting lingers.

I dream of the day when somebody will stage a production of styrofoam cup dismantlings...a wonderfully chaotic symphony orchestrating the simultaneous screeckkk...screeckkk...screeckkks produced by hordes of cups large and small, each tuned to its own cacophony, its own joyfully annoying disruptive sounds

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EMBRACE HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER THE CITY

--Jim Reed

The entire Downtown world happens out of the corner of your eye. When you’re supposed to be watching something straight ahead, you can have some fun, just paying attention to what’s going on around the edges. For instance:

At the checkout counter, one tabloid headline catches my eye: DEMI PREGNANT

Who, I wonder, is only demi-pregnant? Doesn’t that translate to a little pregnant? I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t get to read the story, but later I guess the tabloid headline was referring to Demi Moore, who is either pregnant or demi-pregnant.

Just too much to ponder over. I have more important things to do in the demi-city.

Later, I’m leaning against my car, getting a sinking sensation as the meter approaches the $40 mark. The sinking sensation is doubled because the car is actually sinking. I can feel it inching down as the weight of the petrol increases its density.

I go home and sit on the deck for a while, listening to the weather sirens, watching the tree limbs brush against Vulcan, at least from my point of view. I can just see Vulcan’s profiled head and spear-truing arm from the deck chair. The setting sun brightens and darkens his pate as the clouds shadow on by.

When I drop laundry off on the way to work, a pedestrian goes from pillar to post—literally. As if wing-walking, he rushes to a street lamp and holds on for dear life, then goes quickly to a parking meter and clings to hold his balance. He goes down the street like that, reminding me of an inebriate I once knew who literally fell up a flight of stairs. No kidding. He started falling forward at the bottom of the stairs and, to keep his balance, began running up the steps to counteract his forward motion. It actually worked, just like in cartoons I used to watch.

I look through a restaurant window at a dining couple. She’s talking and pecking at her food, jamming her fork among the veggies, accenting her flow of conversation. The man she’s with seems dazed and silent.

Back on the street near my shop: even though Cowboy owes me money, he hits me up for more, but this time I refuse.

Panhandlers and fundraisers—how are they different from one another?

I still miss that packet of fresh, uncirculated two-dollar bills I lost the other day. I was enjoying giving them to grandkids and anybody else who might smile at the gift.

I did manage to give a sticky, oversized die (a demi-set of dice) to a kid today. It starts blinking colored lights when you throw it. It makes me smile, anyhow.

To cheer myself up, I always do what I would like others to do to me. I give a silent, unsolicited present, hoping to catch them off-guard, hoping to make them giggle despite their mindset. Sometimes it works so well, they’re not even aware it’s happened, not even aware I had anything to do with it. Then, that causes me to feel good for a moment.

After all, moments are all we have, one after another. Wing-walking: Not letting go of one moment till you’ve gotten hold of the next moment. Know what I mean

************************

AN IRON-STEADY FRIEND OF BIRMINGHAM GOES AWAY

--Jim Reed

I keep gazing at two wonderful photographs taken by Birmingham’s David Murray. Both are Downtown-centric. One depicts the Storyteller at Five Points South. The other depicts the rusty, old, seemingly permanent, Sloss Furnace complex.

For some reason, these images make me think about Sheldon Schaffer, my friend who died last week.

Nobody was a bigger promoter of Birmingham and its endless potential for good, than was Sheldon Schaffer. If you never met Sheldon, it would be difficult to describe him. I’ll try:

Sheldon was an indefatigable instigator, an outside agitator who become a many-decades resident of this city. By his own self-description, Sheldon was a liberal secular Jew, a civil rights activist, a card-carrying ACLU member, an economist, a curmudgeon who had little patience with sluggards and uninsightful thinkers.

Sheldon wanted you to DO something, rather than just whine about it. And, like a bulldog, he would never give you an inch if you didn’t get up off your duff and campaign for justice and equal rights, if you didn’t fight against bigotry, racism, intolerance, mean-spiritedness and stupidity.

In David Murray’s photograph, the Storyteller sits implacable and weaves his tales--he’s not budging, because it is his job to stay in one place, tell you what you need to know, then wait for you to take some action.

In David’s photo of Sloss, much the same thing is happening. Sloss sits, looking like nothing you’ve ever seen before, waiting for you to figure out the history upon which it rests. Like the Sphinx and Sheldon Schaffer, Sloss waits for you to draw upon the wisdom you already have, and figure out the riddles yourself.

Sheldon Schaffer inspired, annoyed, egged on, a couple of generations of people who meant well but had little direction. He helped give us direction, whenever we got past our irritability at his techniques.

He made us feel like things were worth doing.

And, since he seldom thanked you when you actually did something good for the community, you just worked all that much harder next time, hoping to win his thanks.

A lot of people did not GET Sheldon, but I like to think I did. He was there to bring us up short when we did less than we could for each other.

Now that I’ve meditated upon Sloss and the Storyteller, something else comes to mind that expresses what I feel much more succintly. It is this poem by Langston Hughes:

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There’s nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I love my friend

--Langston Hughes

************************

THE LONG WALKS OF ROSA, FRANCES AND FRASIER

by Jim Reed (www.jimreedbooks.com)

This column is about three long walks that changed the way people looked at the world. Every word is true. And in any town, you can learn more about what happened during those days of old, the days before yesterday, by paying attention and by visiting the Public Library, and by taking time to listen to the old stories.

***

LONG WALK NUMBER ONE.

When Gedney Howe was a little boy, his favorite companion was an elderly African American neighbor everybody simply called, "Frasier." As Howe’s daughter, Alabama attorney Belle Stoddard, tells it, "Frasier loved Gedney and was often making toys for him or giving him other presents.

"One day," Belle says, "Frasier proudly presented Gedney with a beautiful, most unusual type of seashell." Everyone was impressed, especially the child. Belle’s grandfather, Chief, recognized the shell as one that could be found only on Edisto Island, a very long way from Belle’s hometown of Charleston. Chief exclaimed,

"Why, Frasier, however did you find this here in town?"

Frasier patiently explained that he had not gotten the shell in town. He had found it on the island. Back then, there was little private--and no public--transporation available, so Chief asked whether Frasier had caught a ride.

"No, sir, I walked all the way and back."

Chief exclaimed, in amazement, "Why that must’ve been fifty miles."

"Well," Frasier said, "I caught a ride part way, but the long walk was part of the gift."

LONG WALK NUMBER TWO.

I was a mere toddler in 1944, and my older sister, Barbara, was just four years ahead of me. One day, my Mother, Frances Lee McGee Reed, and Barbara and I were riding the bus home from Downtown Tuscaloosa. This was back in the days when the bus company boldly displayed a sign up front that read, COLORED TO REAR, WHITE TO FRONT. It took me years to figure out what that meant.

Anyhow, at one of the stops, a very young, very pregnant African American woman boarded the bus, which was filled to overflowing--no seats available.

Mother immediately got up and offered her seat to the young woman, who was grateful for the chance to sit steady.

The bus came to a halt, the very red-faced driver stomped down the aisle, stared at the woman and demanded she get up and let the white lady sit back down. My Mother, suddenly also red-faced, stared him down and exclaimed, "This woman is pregnant, and she can have my seat!"

The driver would hear none of it--as long as there was no seat available, the black woman would have to stand up.

Mother’s solution was simple. She yanked Barbara’s arm and headed toward the exit, leaving the seat empty. Barbara yanked my arm and made sure the three of us were locked together as we got off the bus.

What my sister, Barbara, remembers, is that the day was bitterly cold, we didn’t have warm clothing, and Mother was very mad.

But we warmed up quickly by taking the long walk home.

LONG WALK NUMBER THREE.

We all know about the long walks of the late Rosa Parks, who was willing to walk rather than be subjugated because of her race. She, like Belle’s friend Frasier and Frances, my mother, all took long, unselfish walks. In the process these three heroes--one well known, the others almost invisible till right now, in this column...these heroes taught those around them the value of meanings behind actions.

The unselfish effort must always be noted, whether it succeeds or not.

They taught us the walk is part of the gift.

*****************

MCSMILE

by Jim Reed

WHY I EAT ONLY AT LOCALLY-OWNED- ONE-LOCATION-ONLY-MOM-AND-POP RESTAURANTS AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

She is roundfaced, attractive, young, with a pert short hairdo to match these wonderful attributes. Her eyes are bright against her tanned skin.

Only thing is, she has no apparent emotions. She's the clerk behind the counter of this fast-food restaurant, and she's waiting on the next customer up.

I am the next customer up.

She does not look me in the eye, she only stares off over the cash register, slightly rolling her eyes in boredom and glancing out the window as she slurs through the obligatory, "WelcometofastfoodcitymayItakeyourorderpleez."

I want to say in a merry and strong voice, "Good morning. I'm feeling good. Thanks for asking. And how are you?" or something sarcastic and inappropriate, but I of course do not say anything.

I try to enunciate my order so that she gets it punched into the register properly before her attention span shrinks.

She takes my money, still never looking at me (In the line-up at the Police Station she could never pick me out, so I guess I could get away with taking an extra catsup packet and heading for them thar Survivalist hills.), and she hands me a wad of change, then turns in the order. The fragrance of big burgers and fries and sanitized grease floats through the air.

Suddenly, her face comes alive, brightens with a big smile that makes her skin glow, that makes her briefly seem slimmer and happier and up from her fast-food coma. She's looking over my shoulder at a friend in another line. "Why hey, girl! How you doing?" she emotes, making the cool, dreary morning a degree warmer for a split second.

Then, as quickly as it appears, the smile is gone, the face sags and goes blank, and she gets back to the task at hand: completing my order so that I will get out of the way for the next invisible customer.

I miss her smile. She will not miss mine.

I miss, too, those days when proprietors thought it important to train employees in human relations and cordiality. I miss the days of Max Cooper--Max was an owner of one of the early fast-food franchises in Birmingham. Once, years ago, I saw him sitting in his car next to one of his restaurants, taking notes on what he saw. I always imagined that he was checking up on the Manners Quotient, inspecting the Attitude Adjustment Scale, getting ready to fine-tune his operation and his employees' ability to make you want to come back soon.

Those long ago days of fast-food restaurants were interesting--there was enough of the old mom-and-pop-service mentality left over from the independent-establishment days to carry over into the franchise decades. It kept the places merry and friendly and did not rely as heavily on toy premiums and playgrounds and 2-for-1 deals to keep the customers wanting more.

Shucks, am I an old fogey, or what? Why can't I just accept the food, pay my money, and pretend I'm at the Automat? If robots were dispensing the meals, I guess I wouldn't expect anything more than vending from them. Vending machines either work or they don't work. But each time, I get fooled into thinking that I might be treated like five dollars worth of human if I'm going to pay five dollars to be served by a human.

Or am I the only one who notices this kind of stuff?

********************

SANTA’S MESSAGE: THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL

by Jim Reed (www.jimreedbooks.com)

I run a Christmas shop, a Christmas museum, a Christmas antique emporium.

Why Christmas?

Well, you’d know the answer to that--if you’d known my Mother.

To Mother, every day was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day combined. All her life, she was able to see through the pain and confusion of life, through to the sweetness that she felt from the time she was born till her own Mother died fifteen years later. She never left childhood alone on the back step, but took it with her and carried her understanding of children and their pure and innocent outlook on life, all the way to another existence, 83 years after her birth.

Every day was Christmas at our house. Each day, we paid careful attention to weeds and frogs and paint chips and stuffed toys and sunbeams and tears and relatives and concrete sidewalks and Pepsi Colas and fresh cornbread. Under Mother’s tutelage, we kids learned to note things, notice things, note people, notice people.

Taking her example, we learned to find something fine in just about everything, everybody, every Thing, every Body. Each day, we woke up to a Christmas gift of life, neatly wrapped, anxiously waiting to be unwrapped.

That being said, maybe the rest of this story will make more sense to you.

Whenever I use the gift of noticing people, I learn something new.

While she was still alive and active, Mother spent some time each day hiding messages she prepared for her kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and her extended family of kids. She didn't give us these messages directly, since her experience with human nature warned her that we would probably ignore them because of our youth and immaturity.

So, Mother sent messages in bottles for us to find accidentally through the years, each time just as we were almost grown-up enough to recognize and appreciate them.

Christmas was Mother's favorite season, so she made sure that more secret messages were generated at that time. She wanted us to remember how much fun, how much love, swirled about our family so that we would remember to pass this joy along to our own families and extended families.

Mother died in 1997, and life went on without her, as life does. We kids and grandkids and great-grandkids went our way and did our own lives the way we thought we had designed them. At times, we acted as if we had never had a mother, as if we had invented ourselves, as if we were self-made.

But we could never fool ourselves for long.

Without Mother's nurturing and sacrifices, without her humor and overwhelming bluntness, we could not have been formed.

One day, my sister Barbara gave me a bunch of stuff she had salvaged from Mother's old house in Tuscaloosa. In the pile was an unopened box that felt hefty enough not to be empty. When I had time a few days later, I took that box up and peered at it, reading the words thereon:

"MUSICAL ROCKING SANTA. Sure to delight collectors of all ages, this 8 inch high rocking Santa captures the spirit of Christmas past with exquisite handfinished detail."

The box was colorful and depicted a kindly snoozing Santa.

The imprinting continued, "It features a genuine Sankyo wind-up musical movement from Japan. Handcrafted and handpainted in China by people who care. This copyrighted design is made under an exclusive licensing agreement with the copyright holder. (C) 1995 II INC."

This box looked familiar to me, but I couldn't quite get it. If it was manufactured in 1995, it couldn't have been one of my childhood toys.

Hmm...

I carefully opened the box, making sure not to damage anything, since I might find that it belonged to somebody else in the family.

Inside, a toy any Christmas Lover would covet:

A statue of Santa Claus--a dozing Santa Claus. I can still see the toy on my shelf at home, today: Santa's dozing, full-capped and furred, in a green highbacked rocking chair with a yellow kitten peeping over his right shoulder, a flop-eared dog in his lap, a December 26 calendar in his drooped left hand and a small toy at his feet. His bathrobe and striped longjohns and tasselled red boots top it all off.

This man is tired and at peace, falling sleep so fast he's forgotten to remove his spectacles.

When I wind him up, the chair gently rocks back and forth, a melody tinkles its way about the room, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas..."

I loved this toy, and it took me a few days to figure out its history. Recalling that Mother never stored anything she owned without leaving a note about it, I went back to the box, turned it upside down and, sure enough, there was Mother's message to me, these few years later. I could hear her musical voice saying it aloud,

"This goes back to Jim after I'm gone! I enjoyed this toy! --Mother"

That was my Mother, ok. She never threw anything away, knowing that someone in the far future would find joy in each remaining object, if only it was stored safely enough to be found.

This was her way of giving back to me the joy I had given her when I presented her with the Santa before she died.

Now, ol' Santa sits on my shelf, waiting to entertain, waiting to make me remember my Christmas Mother, waiting for me to pass him along to the next person who would take a close look at the bottom of the box to see what kind of message I would add to Mother's.

************************

MY PULITZER PRIZE

by Jim Reed

Why did I ever go into retail?

Well, you know the answer to that--if you, too, are in retail.

I did it because I couldn’t think of any other way to be my own boss and actually provide food and shelter for the family, outside the corporate world. I couldn’t think of any other way to have the freedom to write what I needed to write, free of the Dilbert shackles of the corporate world.

So, a couple of decades later, here I am, at 4:50pm on Friday, just ten minutes till closing time, digging through computer-numbered boxes for a 1962 Esquire Magazine featuring Hemingway, a 1956 BBC Listener magazine containing a Salinger review, a first printing of Asimov’s The Martian Way, and a first edition copy of Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeams...got to get these things overnighted for an anxious customer and then make it to a bookshop across town to conduct a reading, all by 6pm.

The front door chimes go off, so that means somebody has entered the store, 150 feet up the hall and up a steep flight of red stairs. You know the mixed feelings you get: Damn! Now I’ve got to wait on somebody and still get my tasks done...if it weren’t for these pesky customers, I could make a living (!).

I head up the hall to see who’s there, passing the glowing lava lamps and glistening Santas that line the path, giving a fairyland glow to the gathering dusk. When I get to the front, I see a small, pointy-haired big-rimmed eyeglass man, standing and staring at me as if I’m about to hit him. I do my usual “Hello, how can I help you today?” customer-friendly voice thing, since I have never seen this guy before.

“Well, do you buy stuff?” he asks. I’m in a hurry, so this means my thoughts are going to be negative--I’m thinking he’s got the usual dog-eared Reader’s Digest Condensed books and Stephen King paperbacks that we see a lot of around here.

“Well, it depends on what it is,” I say, thinking this does not look like a millionaire about to donate his Gutenberg Bible to me. “We have just about everything, but we’re always looking for what we don’t have,” I say, motioning down the hallway at the 6,000-square-foot shop.

“What about this?” he says, pulling a rusty three-inch-tall miniature replica of a Sprite cola bottle from his pocket. It’s cute, just the thing I have all over the store for decoration, along with the life-sized Leg Lamp from Jean Shepherd, the seven-foot-tall Piggly Wiggly statue and the Pee-Wee Herman Playhouse suitcase, interspersed with books galore.

The next negative thought I have is that he will, like most people, have watched the Antiques Roadshow and determined that this is worth $32,000, of which I should pay him half for re-sale.

I brace myself and say, “That’s neat. How much do you want for it?” He says in a small and meek voice, “What about a dollar?”

I am relieved and brighten up instantly, I pull a dollar from the cash tray, give it to him and he walks happily toward the stairs.

He bends to pick up two large and obviously heavy satchels he’s lugged up the stairs--I’m just now noticing them. Then, he turns and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Jimmie Hale?”

The Jimmie Hale mission is for homeless people, and it’s seven walking blocks away. I give him instructions, he thanks me, then begins his painful descent. I wait in the foyer, hoping he doesn’t stumble, and hoping I can get the door locked behind him so I can head to the post office on my way to being an unknown author reading his stuff aloud.

I can tell he’s about halfway down the stairs when I hear his meek voice, “I read everything you write.” I freeze in place to hear more. “And I see your columns in Birmingham Weekly. You are a natural-born writer.”

I can only yell THANKS! as he closes the door behind him and disappears from hearing. I rush down the stairs to lock up, look up and down the street, and see nothing. No trace of this fellow and his heavy luggage and his mild temperament.

I lock the door, take down the OPEN sign, and start up the stair, turning out lights as I go.

Back at my counter, I reach into my pocket for keys and find the tiny Sprite bottle. I hold it up to the lava lights and note its special green glow. And I wonder what a Pulitzer Prize looks like. This may be as close to one as I’ll ever get, so I’m going to adopt it and keep it around to remind me that now and then--just every once in a while--a writer can get a good review, a good award, at an unexpected time from an unlikely source...and then wonder later whether it was all imagination.

At the reading, I tell the story of the little man and his Sprite bottle to Joey Kennedy, who is a genuine Putlizer Prize winner. He grins ear to ear, because he knows all about fate and how things come to you only if you don’t look at them straight on.

************************

ALIENS AND EARTHLINGS FINALLY COMMUNICATE

by Jim Reed (www.jimreedbooks.com)

The greyhaired man and his wife wander attentively through the stacks of books and ephemera in my Museum of Fond Memories.

They’ve never been here before, but they are excited to find a quiet haven, surrounded by 500 years of artifacts, the kinds of artifacts they know have just been lost to them forever in their hometown, New Orleans.

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

A rough-edged woman shows up at the bookloft, talking excitedly about the old magazines and books 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.

Larry Fikes at the Redmont Hotel tells me stories about refugees he’s housing, Teresa Thorne sends emails pleading for aid for refugees at the Civic Center.

Beth Williams is lying in the hospital nearby, donating a kidney to a friend. My daughter, Margaret, sends a note that her church in Fairhope has turned itself into a refugee soup kitchen, that thousands are being helped throughout Baldwin County.

Suburban neighbors say they still don’t have electricity, but they don’t seem to be complaining or whining as much as you might think.

I remember back to the day after 9/11, when my son-in-law, Derek, walked into his home 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 garbage workers who usually toss things about in their rush to get it done. They, too, acted not quite as abruptly as you might predict.

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

One of my favorite movie scenes drifts into full view in my mind. In the film STARMAN, an enthusiastic and frustrated SETI scientist, played by Charles Martin Smith, is desperately attempting to communicate with a superior-intelligenced alien, played by Jeff Bridges. Smith is trying to learn all he can before the Government and the vivisectionists arrive to enslave and examine this alien, just in case he presents a threat to Earth.

And then, a great cinematic moment occurs.

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

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

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

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

The scientist can only nod.

"You are at your very best when things are worst."

And that’s the scene.

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.

We are at our very best when things are worst.

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.

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

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

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

************************

WHAT DAY ISN’T FATHER’S DAY?

Most of us don’t get a chance to select our given names, mainly because, as infants, we can’t articulate the words needed to make a suggestion for a good name. So, we live with what’s given us.

My name is James Thomas Reed, III, which means that my father and paternal grandfather had the same name. It just kind of trickled down to me. My grandfather was called Jim, my father was called Tommy, and I am Jim.

My grandfather bought a house in the tiny coal mining town West Blocton, Alabama, around the turn of the century—a house that is still standing. On Easter Sunday in the year 1909, my father, Tommy, was born in that house. Since there were seven or so brothers and sisters ahead of Tommy, my grandfather Jim placed the infant in an Easter basket and announced to his brood that the Easter Bunny had delivered this pink, noisy package.

Back then, kids believed that sort of thing.

Now, to know my father, you’d have to know the people he admired, since men in his generation weren’t much for sitting around telling you about themselves. No, you just had to look around and pay attention to the men whose lives they emulated.

In my father’s case, I can remember who some of his heroes, both literary and real, were:

Sergeant Alvin York, who never accepted a dime in trade for the heroism he’d shown for his country in World War I.

Preacher Josiah Dozier Grey, and Uncle Famous Prill, the heroes of Joe David Brown’s Birmingham novel/movie, Stars in My Crown, men who never wavered from belief in family and neighbors and principles. They were forerunners of Atticus Finch and other strong Southern heroes of fiction and non-fiction.

Harry Truman, who dispensed with nonsense and tried to do the right thing, even when it was not popular. He was in a long line of no-nonsense leaders, such as John L. Lewis and Eric Hoffer, people who thought for themselves and never followed a posse or a trend.

Jesus Christ, who, like my father, was a carpenter, and a principled man.

And so on.

Now, it’s important to understand this one thing about my father—to look at him, to be around him, you’d never know he was a hero. He was a working-class, blue-collar, unassuming person you’d probably not notice on the street, unless you noted that he limped from an old coal mining injury received when he tried to save another man’s life.

It was his very invisibility that made him a true hero, because he did the kind of thing that nobody gets credit for: he loved unconditionally and without reward.

That’s right. He was a practitioner of unconditional love for family, the kind of love that seeks no return, no attention. You would have embarrassed Tommy Reed if you had tried to thank him for his acts of kindness, because you were not supposed to notice.

He gave money in secret to relatives in need.

He grimaced and bore silently the abuse of those who forgot to appreciate or thank him.

And he never announced his good deeds. You just had to catch him now and then in an act of kindness.

His heroes were all men who didn’t need adulation. What my father needed was a hard day’s work at an honest job, a few moments of privacy after a good meal, time to read a book or watch television with a child or grandchild on his lap, and an occasional hug from his 50-year wife, my mother.

You could do worse than have a father like Preacher Grey and Joel McCrea, Uncle Famous and Juano Hernandez, Gregory Peck and Atticus Finch, Eric Hoffer, John L. Lewis, Harry Truman, Sergeant York and Gary Cooper, and Jesus.

Do they make ‘em like that any more? You bet they do, but you won’t know about it for a while, because they don’t have press agents.

What they do have is the appreciation that takes years to grow and make itself known, the appreciation we come to have after we, too, have been called upon to commit an occasional act of unrewarded kindness.

Take another look at your father.

Who are his silent heroes?

Who are yours?

--Jim Reed

*******************************************

EVERY FATHER IS YOUR FATHER

EVERY FATHER IS MY FATHER

by Jim Reed (jim@jimreedbooks.com)

There are as many kinds of fathers as there are fathers, plus some!

After all, a father can come in more than one size, more than one shape, more than one gender, even!

So, here’s to every good and kind father, whatever the planet of origin:

You go! biological fathers, test-tube fathers, guardian fathers, absentee fathers, only-in-your-imagination fathers, good-pal fathers, uplifting fathers, step-fathers, out-of-step fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, fathers both great and grand, foster fathers, stand-in fathers, well-meaning fathers, wanna-be fathers, to-be fathers, female fathers, long-gone fathers, faraway fathers, surrogate fathers, gentle fathers, good example fathers...

You rock! gay fathers, straight fathers, not-quite-sure fathers, black fathers, brown fathers, red fathers, pale pink fathers, pasty complexioned fathers, fathers we wish we had, fathers we wish we had back, fathers in jail, fathers on bail, disenfranchised fathers, fathers in the hospital, fathers in a nursing home, fathers asylumed, banned fathers,

absentee-but-not-on-purpose fathers, appreciated fathers, outcast fathers, should-be-appreciated fathers, fathers whose wallets are depreciated...

You mean much to us, you good and kindly fathers. If we’ve failed to say it to you lately or never, take this little page and place it in a pocket where you can sit down and look at it for a moment, now and then.

You go!

This is especially for fathers who go to the trouble to, fathers who take care of the fatherless, Big Brother fathers, fathers who listen, fathers who’ve downgraded their attitudes from critical to judgmental to kindly and sweet, fathers who love loudly, fathers who love quietly, fathers who just do the right thing and never expect credit.

Your loving son,

********************************************

DOWNTOWN RHAPSODY # 1...........

THE HORRORS OF BOOKDEALING DOWNTOWN

My latest bookloft customer is a pleasant, attractive young woman who's dropped in to pick up an out-of-print book we've ordered for her.

As usual, I've placed the book in an obscure place and must spend a few minutes locating it, er, trying to remember where I put it.

The young woman stands at the bookloft counter, staring straight ahead, not looking right or left.

"It may take a little while for me to put my hands on the book, so why don't you browze through the store a bit?" I ask, fully aware that she's a first-time customer and has yet to be amazed at what we carry in our 6,000-square-foot museum of fond memories.

I continue rummaging about, but notice out of my peripheral vision that the young woman is still staring ahead, not turning around to be astounded.

I repeat my invitation for her to look around, and she makes bodily motions as if she's going to do just that, but when Craig finally fishes the book out of obscurity and brings it to her, she's still standing in the same spot.

She's happy to have the book--just the one she's wanted for years--but she still fidgets a bit and doesn't leave the store. I've already gone back to my computer cataloguing, thinking she's left the building, when she says, "I wonder...do you think...uh, would you mind escorting me down the stairs to my car?"

I realize then, that she's got the FEAR OF DOWNTOWN SYNDROME, one we see several times a week, year 'round, one we keep thinking is going to go away, someday.

I immediately volunteer to escort her downstairs. I'm happy to do so, since it means she might feel less afraid, I might get a chance to propagandize her a bit about the wonders and safety of Downtown Birmingham, Alabama, these days, and she will at least get to her car safely, as I promise she will.

While we're walking around the block to the Water Works parking lot, I'm chatting away at how Downtown is so much safer than the superdupermegaMALL parking lot or any of the overcrowded suburbs, but, at the same time, I'm trying to see the world through her eyes for a minute.

We pass by the diverse group of people waiting for a bus or a poor-man’s trolley, past the line outside the Water Works payment center, right by the corner where a panhandler aggressively walks toward us, past the bankers and office workers who are strolling comfortably to get a snack at the hotdog stand beneath the bookloft and a little piece of sunshine, past the peanut vendor who's trying to hustle another dollar bag, past the boom-box-loud cars parked in the lot, drivers waiting for whoever's inside paying the water bill or whoever's crossed the street to pay the gas bill, past the automobile salesman who's hurrying a customer to a Ford backlot to see a particular car.

It's a melting pot of folks, young and old, ethnic and not, poor and middle-class, bored and happy, employed and looking...but they are all simply doing their thing, their things, in Downtown Birmingham.

A friendly civic security officer waves as he swooshes by in his silent battery-driven vehicle, I help the customer into her car, she promises that, oh, yes, she'll be back one day when she has more time, she throws the electric locks on the door, checks to see if windows are secure, and drives nervously away to more familiar territory.

There are thousands of stories in the naked city, and this one feels and looks like a whole lot of stories I've experienced in all the years I've lived and worked Downtown. I know Downtown is safe and fun, but how do I convince this woman and all the other customers who furtively run up the stairs, their drivers running the getaway car motors all the while, waiting, then run down the stairs, never having experienced Mister Reed's Neighborhood the way Mister Reed does?

All I can do is keep trying.

Because, as you and I know, our special place, Downtown Birmingham, is just another place. If you work and live here, and then visit the alien suburbs, you're apt to be just as nervous as that young woman, just as anxious to get the heck out of Dodge and come back home to the center of the universe.

--Jim Reed (C)

************************************

DOWNTOWN RHAPSODY # 2.................

DOWNTOWN BIRMINGHAM AND ALL THAT JAZZ

I hear it, even when I’m not listening to it.

Listen: you can hear it, too.

It’s a sound peculiar to the South, and most peculiar to Downtown Birmingham right now. It’s a rattle that’s immediately recognizable, a multiple-clinking, hollow sound that gurgles just a bit.

Now, this sound is accompanied by certain movements, if you cast your eyes sideways and take a peek.

The hand next to me in the eatery is shaking, the glass of iced tea rattling loudly. A yankee might think the diner is palsied, but we indigenous folk know the facts. This person is doing exactly what thousands of Birminghamians do each and every day--he’s shaking loose the ice cubes right before glugging some tea.

There’s a purpose to this act of quivering. Everybody knows that ice cubes tend to stick together once they’ve sat for awhile. If you don’t shake them down a bit before drinking, they’re likely to come loose when you tip the glass, and spatter you with more fluid than you’re prepared to absorb.

I like the iced tea palsy. It has a rhythm that is mere underlayment to the noise of the restaurant.

If you tune out the conversation and listen to everything else that’s going on, it’s like a free-form jazz concert. There’s rhythmic throat-clearing, a snort now and then, a guffaw that punctuates a melody, the aluminum squeak of a door that doesn’t hang just right.

You can also hear a flushing toilet nearby and hope, usually in vain, to hear the sound of a faucet running for a moment afterward.

There’s the loud waitress’s call to the customer, “Whatchugonehave?” and there’s the even louder translation of what the customer mumbles, “Chicken salad hold the pickle add fries...eye-TAL-yun!”

Other parts of this continuing jazz festival include slurping noises as a child finishes up a Pepsi through an air-bubbled straw, rustling of newspapers as diners squeeze their shoulders tight to accommodate other diners, some kind of whiny country music on the speaker system not quite tuned to the station’s frequency, the distinctive noice produced when you carefully dismantle a styrofoam cup piece by piece.

There are two free jazz concerts you won’t want to miss if you come Downtown. One is the concert that’s all around you everywhere you go, the other is the first-Sunday-of-the-month concert on Southside at 5:30pm (in Foster Auditorium at Southside Baptist Church). Each is a world of its own, but the startling and wonderful thing about these two concerts is that they overlap with one another.

Each concert is perpetual, by the way.

The Foster Auditorium Jazz Vespers gig has been going on for ten years, the other one is, well, forever minus the breadth of human existence in Birmingham.

It’s that parallel-universe overlap of excruciatingly beautiful and provocative sounds that makes life in the city so special.

Come do some jazz, Downtown. Be a player (use your drinking straws for countertop impromptu drumming, your nervous twitch to follow a boombox beat) or be a good listener (is the air conditioning hum in tune with the street-level brake squeal?), or be a good watcher (peek over your menu to observe the three-year-old slapping some catsup on his forehead, look over the table at the nervously tapping shoes).

There’s music to be had, and there’s music that will have you, if you’ll only stop to notice.

--Jim Reed (c)

*****************************

DOWNTOWN RHAPSODY # 3..............

ART IS WHAT ART IS, IS WHAT I SAY!

You can look at art anywhere you go in Downtown Birmingham.

You can look high, at the cracks and cornices of buildings. You can look low, at the splits and gaps in the sidewalks, at the graffiti messages left on walls. You can look in merchants’ windows and do a little daydreaming.

You can peer through loosely taped windows of vacant buildings and see ghosts.

You can look at Downtown Birmingham itself as a work of art--a conglomeration of mixed media, moods, politics and procilivities many decades old.

You can look at art fingered in the dust of automobile hoods. Or, you can actually see structured, commercially-priced art in galleries, shops, offices, restaurants...all over town.

The variety of art on display is amazing, the range of talents daunting, the total cost of professional framing astronomical.

But it’s well worth it.

I was standing in the Birmingham Art Association gallery one night, enjoying the view: members’ works of art ranging from massive sculpture to oil and pastel paintings to thingies made out of tin cans and styrofoam cups.

I was really into diversity at the time, so I found metaphor in everything I saw.

Suddenly, a completely original work jumped out at me. There, right in front of me, was an ornate, carefully carved and painted picture frame...without a picture! “Wow!” I said, as people of my generation are wont to say, about a hundred too many times, each day. “Wow!” This artist simply turned her creativity inside out and made the FRAME the subject to enjoy, to study, to examine.

A frame without a picture. What a concept!

I was already writing my next column in my head, on the aesthetic and social appeal of frames, in which the content of the frames itself was meaningless, while only the frame held substance.

“Excuse me!” a young artist said, as she walked between me and the frame and stood with her back to me. I was about to say something, when I realized she was actually doing something to the framed wonder before me.

“There!” she exclaimed (she really did EXCLAIM). She backed up, murmured (she really did MURMUR) her approval, and walked away.

There before me was the frame, complete with painting. She had just now gotten around to placing the picture in the frame.

I glanced around to see if anybody had read my mind or heard my thoughts about the effete and “in” world of paintingless frames. “Whew!” Nobody knew that I had just made a fool of myself--in front of myself.

Somewhat cowed and wiser, I slunk over to the hors d’oeuvres table and ate a bit too much for the duration of the art exhibit.

See? Art is anything you want it to be. But pause long and hard before advancing new theories to the art world. Chances are, somebody got there ahead of you, and thus knows more than you.

Just enjoy the moment.

Downtown is a work of art. Art works are everywhere Downtown. Check it out.

--Jim Reed (c)

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DOWNTOWN RHAPSODY # 4...............

DOWNTOWN TREK

If you live or work or shop or tour Downtown, you know stuff that suburbanites don’t know...things they can’t know till they join the Downtown Explorers Club.

Now, the Downtown Explorers Club is a well-kept secret, mainly because I just made it up. But why don’t we form one?

Downtown is a remarkable place, and here’s how you can prove it to yourself:..but only if you are daring and adventuresome! JOIN THE DOWNTOWN EXPLORERS CLUB.

Do an about-face and take a long look at where you spend your time Downtown.

For instance, if you work Downtown, now’s the time to strike out on your own and learn new and interesting and profound things. Take a break sometime during the day and leave your place of work (flint and coonskin cap not required!). Walk two blocks north. Look right, left, behind and up. Note what you see, hear, smell, feel…notice what you like, what makes you uncomfortable, what your thoughts are.

Then, Walk two blocks south, back to your place of work. Think about everything you learned, think about what you’d like to learn, think about what buildings and shops you want to explore, what faces you’d like to see again.

TAKE A FIELD TRIP!

Next day, take a break and walk two blocks south. Repeat previous directions.

You can do variations on this exercise as you get more comfortable with being a Downtown Explorer. On a city map, draw a circle around your place of business that is two blocks in radius. Give yourself a couple of weeks to explore every part of that 4-block-in-diameter circle around where you work.

What can you purchase within that circle? What services can you obtain? What poetic experiences can you have? What art and graffiti do you see? What signs and posters stand out? What statues and plaques are within that circle? What kind of architecture do you see around you?

Are there gargoyles atop the buildings, bits of molding you never saw before, mysterious windows you’d like to see through, ledges you’d like to walk in your imagination?

Think of that circle as your own private island. Think of yourself as Robinson Crusoe, a castaway in paradise, determined to learn and experience something outside the ordinary routines you’ve established all these years. Imagine what kind of people work and live in those buildings, what kinds of street people and vendors thrive there, what kinds of families Downtown denizens have, what they’re like after-hours.

And next time, triple your circle size by hopping a Dart each day. Go forth and join the elite circle of the Downtown Explorers Club. You’ll never be the same.

--Jim Reed (c)

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Now, fifty years later, I really do believe it.

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THE GRAND OLD OPERA LIVES ON!

I used to have this recurrent fantasy. In my daydream, I am driving along, heading down Birmingham's 20th Street, windows down and radio turned up full-blast. Bliss is written all over my face. I pull up to a traffic light and in the lane beside me is a man whose radio is turned up full-blast, too. His radio is playing emotion-laden, scatalogically robust hip hop music, full of profanity and violence. And it’s real loud. Attitude Bliss is written all over his face. My radio, on the other hand, is playing emotion-laden, violence-ridden, over-the-top grand opera. Suddenly, for a split second, he realizes that my music is his music. I realize that his music is my music. Each music in its own small universe is the music of nightmares and reality and deprivation and hopefulness, love, lust, and celestial warfare. The driver looks me in the eye, raises an eyebrow, and nods, then speeds away. I continue my trek through Downtown, a moment of revelation and wisdom filed away for later.

At the age of 17, I became a radio announcer at a public radio/classical music FM station just like WBHM, only this station was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and it was called WUOA. Back then, in 1959, there were only a few such stations in the country, but they set the standard for what really good public radio stations would be for the next forty years. On our Tuscaloosa station, we concentrated wholeheartedly on classical music, opera, music from the theatre, ballet...with a smattering of jazz, stand-up comedy, folk and experimental music.

And on Saturday afternoons, there was the Metropolitan Opera.

I had never heard entire operas before, but as the newest member of the announcing team, I got to work the shifts nobody else favored--and that included Saturday afternoons. While other students were attending football games and going creek-banking, I was trapped inside the control room, listening to opera. While I did all those things announcers were expected to do on duty--file recordings, cue up tapes, read transmitter gauges, fill in program logs, write narratives and promotional announcements for future shows--I was exposed to the wonderful dulcet announcing tones of Milton Cross, the host for the Texaco Opera. Cross always sounded as if he were the world's greatest and most well-informed opera buff, and he told me way more than I ever had planned on knowing. At first, I felt like the nerd that I was, listening to all those great singers. But it didn't take long for me to immerse myself in the music, appreciate the enormous voices that opera singers always possessed, and eventually feel very incomplete if I didn't get to hear an entire opera at least once a week.

It was an incredible education, and I was being paid to obtain it!

And, so, more than forty years later, I still find myself arranging life so that I am a captive audience of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. I work the Saturday shifts at Reed Books, and I do all those things that bookdealers have to do--catalogue new acquisitions, file and arrange books, pay bills, greet and assist customers, answer the phone--but mainly, I get to listen to a full opera each Saturday all by myself.

It's been a wonderful life. Surely, no-one would ever dream of taking this life away from me. It's just too beautiful, listening to voices that are a dozen times bigger than the voices of hip hop artists, orchestras a hundredfold larger than hip hop bands. And all right here, in Downtown Birmingham, where you can get anything you want--even grand opera!

Why, if anyone ever took that away, anything could happen next. What if they decided to remove Daniel Schorr from the airwaves? That would be like taking the wisest, most experienced journalist in radio and locking him inside a padded room.

In another daydream, I'm actually in a padded room with the late Milton Cross and the present-day Daniel Schorr, and we're having a great time, listening to the music and chatting between acts. And the hip hop radio guy joins us now and then, listens knowingly, then plays us a cut or two of his music. And after awhile, we begin to appreciate and understand one another, and the diversity that all forms of music can bring to the world, if we'll only keep listening together.

--Jim Reed ©

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THE OLEOLYMPICS MEET THE SILLY OLYMPICS

I always appreciate it when I'm reminded that there are people like me. It's a little scary, since, like Groucho Marx, I'm not sure I want to hang out with the likes of me. But, nevertheless, I like knowing that, here and there, there are people like me.

For instance, The Olympic Games remind me that there are people who will never succeed at sports because, like me, they are clumsy or uncoordinated or non-aggressive or just plain bored by sports.

Bored by sports? Un-American! Well, certainly, Un-Alabamian. I don't mean it to be--I'm just being honest. I'm not interested in competitive sports.

But I LOVE sports for the fun of it!

Take the Silly Olympics. The Monty Python comic troupe used to hold a Silly Olympics. It was my kind of sport! Everybody was having fun, nobody got hurt, and nobody won.

For instance, in the Silly Olympics there was a track event for people with a poor sense of direction. When the gun was fired into the air, the runners took off in every compass direction and never returned. There was a track event for people who walk funny, one for people hard of hearing...you get the gist. It was for fun!

In the world's greatest daily comic strip, Pogo, the characters always held their own Oleolympics games. Nobody knew what the rules were but everybody had a good time.

I would buy a ticket to the Tim Conway Little Old Man Olympics. Conway doesn't know this, but in my mind, I'm picturing a bunch of elderly guys, all of whom walk excruciatingly slowly, racing to see who will come in last and win the big prize.

And all Li'l Abner fans remember that the winner of the Sadie Hawkins Day race was always the person who came in Number Two and nabbed the frontrunner from behind.

Oh, I might watch an Olympic event or two, but always for the wrong reasons. I like to watch slow motion events, but I always wonder why the ice skaters have to have their performances critiqued aloud while they are skating. Why don't announcers and over-the-hill ballerinas criticize and comment during an entire Alabama Ballet performance? ("Oops! Her tutu is just too-too! Guess her performance just isn't up to par.")

The comedians Bob and Ray once narrated an entire football game halftime show as if it were a biblical spectacle, and satirist Peter Schickele once did a play-by-play calling of a Beethoven Fifth Symphony movement as if it were a football game. Now if THOSE were Olympic events, I'd buy a ticket!

Surely, in all of Ancient Greece, there must have been at least one non-sports guy entertaining himself by walking past the ticket booths at The Games and wondering whether it wouldn't be more fun to hold a Toga party to see how many people would fit inside one of those booths.

Now THAT'S a sporting event, to people like me!

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BAR-B-COMMUNION

BAR-B-COMMUNION

When you're traveling around Alabama trying to find a fun festival to attend, sometimes you just gotta have some good old-fashioned Southern bar-b-q

But sometimes, the best bar-b-q exists only in your fondest memories, and you have to make do with what you can find.

All Bar-B-Q is hereunto judged against the toughest standards that you and I and time could ever dream up, once you've had the best.

In Tuscaloosa, the universal immovable irrevocable highest standard was set--at least in our little family on Eastwood Avenue--by Smalley's Bar-B-Q.

Most people in Tuscaloosa never even heard of Smalley's when I was growing up, but our family thought of Smalley's as being the one and only truest-tasting bar-b-q in the known universe. Smalley's was located on a tiny out-of-the-way one-way lane called Convent Street. You had to be going to Smalley's to even know where it was. It was close to the University of Alabama though largely invisible.

The thing about Smalley's bar-b-q was its absolute leanness--if you can call pure pork lean. It was thick, virtually without fat of any kind, and evenly textured, and it went with anything you could dream up to eat with it. The sauce was sweet with a touch of bitterness, but the pork was so flavorful and charcoaly that you could serve it without sauce and still know you were eating good old fattening original Southern bar-b-q.

Smalley's bar-b-q was our family's way of showing affection to one another. When anybody came from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham to see me, they'd bring a chunk of Smalley's with them, knowing that although I'd eat just about anybody's bar-b-q, I was never quite as satisfied as when I got hold of some Smalley's.

Whenever I'd visit home, more often than not my brother Tim or sister Rosi or my Father would have gone by Smalley's and picked up some slaw and beans and pork to have sitting on the table by the time I got there.

It was a sure way of knowing that my family remembered not only me, but the things I liked.

In the early 1980's after football coach Bart Starr would visit Birmingham's Children's Hospital, I'd drive him back to the airport, but always after taking him to the Golden Rule Bar-B-Q Restaurant for an order of bar-b-q to be taken home to his wife.

He claimed nobody in Green Bay knew how to fix bar-b-q.

Starr felt the same way about Golden Rule that our family felt about Smalley's--and I'll bet he would have found Smalley's somewhat lacking, though I can't tell why.

Orders of Smalley's Bar-B-Q kept me in touch with my memories of Tuscaloosa all those years I was away. Smalley's always helped me remember the good times and the great days I had in that little college town. If you think about it, the specific taste of a dinner you love is a great way to re-live a wonderful experience. Mercy! It just occurred to me that Jesus himself probably knew exactly what he was doing when he laid out the ritual all his followers would need to practice in order to keep their memories of him strong and alive: break a certain kind of bread (unleavened), eat a certain kind of meat (roast lamb) and a certain kind of salad (parsley and other greens), drink a certain kind of drink (red wine), savor the taste and texture and goodwill associated with a good, friendly and deeply felt meal--and then repeat the procedure lots of times for all time to come.

And that, I guess, is what a famous football coach, a barely famous Tuscaloosa family and a most-famous Rabbi of old had in common: a need to help others revive and re-live the important turning points of life through a simple ritual involving food and friendship.

In my mind, I can just taste Smalley's Bar-B-Q now.

As long as I'm able to recall that charcoal flavor I can pull up a whole host of memories that make me realize that I've never left Tuscaloosa at all. That is, Tuscaloosa has never left me.
********************************* (C) Jim Reed *********************************

MY AUNT MATTY

From the time I was 3 years old, the living room of my family's home on Eastwood Avenue in Tuscaloosa prominently displayed two large, very dramatic paintings: one of a great big moose whose profile gazed into the distant wilds of an unfamiliar landscape, the other of Old Ironsides, a ship listing bravely through a storm.

Both these paintings were created by my Aunt Matty Reed Wooten, who lived in West Blocton, and who was the first adult artist in my life.

Much of the artwork I was to see through life somehow had to live up to what Aunt Matty had painted, and I couldn't help comparing her images to all those that came later. Aunt Matty's paintings were straightforward and largely self-taught, but you could read the emotion that she had poured into them from her paint-stained fingers. Nothing ever looked static in her pictures--Something was about to Happen at any moment in both of them.

Aunt Matty was kind of a gentle, no-nonsense person who always found just the right positive note to inject into any conversation. With her almost mid-western twang, she would pronounce things a bit differently from other Southerners. The word "battery" would become BATT-tree, the word "fetch" seemed exactly accurate and more descriptive than mundane words like "carry" or "retrieve." And she used words that country people still use: a suitcase was a "grip" or a "tote," for instance.

Aunt Matty lived in the house her father, James Thomas Reed (my grandfather), had purchased near the local coal mines at the time the 19th century became the 20th, and the foyer of the house was a shrine to any child who entered and saw a wonderful old foot-pedal organ just waiting to be played.

Old books and papers and other essential ephemera abounded in Aunt Matty's house, and visiting her always made me remember the wonderful times I spent there as a child.

There would be wild turkeys in the back yard, a no-longer-used out-house to the side, kerosene lanterns left over from the days when the house had no electricity, and a genuine wood-burning kitchen stove always in action.

Even in the days after the house was electrified and plumbed and heating did not depend upon chopped wood or coal lumps, the house still had the feel of being primitive, of existing in another time when little luxuries were great big luxuries and nobody had yet learned about Television and Computers and Space Travel and Muggings in the streets.

The hand-hewn house in which Aunt Matty lived still lives fresh and strong in my memory as a symbol of all the simple, pleasant pleasures we enjoyed long before we learned to compare what we had with what our neighbors had.

It was a time when we took each joy separately and with reverence and placed it in special nooks of our minds to be dredged up on days like this, a day when I need to remember the purity and strength of Aunt Matty's paintings in our little living room, paintings of things I'd never see in the flesh, paintings of things I'd never have to see to believe, because those paintings were much more real to me than anything like them I've seen in the best galleries of Atlanta, New York and Chicago.

Aunt Matty and I shared the same Scotch-Irish-Native American bloodstream, and it was good to know that she represented my father's family a good ten years beyond my father's death.

It was good to have an Aunt Matty, a gentle, witty and artistic soul whose purpose among us was in part to remind us of what we, too, have deep inside: the ability to depict a large moose or a gigantic ship in any way we feel them, and no matter what anybody else would ever say about our depictions, they would always be exactly the way we saw them, and to Aunt Matty that's all that was important

--Jim Reed

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A SHURFINE DAY

I'M SITTING IN MY BOOKLOFT BITING into chewy chunks of a big lump of ShurFine Marshmallows from Merv Torme's grocery store, the marshmallows being a big lump because they've somehow managed to stick together, making one enormous ten-ounce piece of candy--or confection--or mushy mint--or, well, just what is a marshmallow anyhow?

As I peel back the plastic wrapper and bite off another lump, I realize that I really don’t know what marshmallows are. There must be some kind of history about them.

Hmm...

A marshmallow has no center core, since the consistency is the same throughout. The outside is slightly different from the inside, possibly because of air getting into the exterior pores and somehow hardening it in a barely noticeable manner.

Now, to the true marshmallow gourmet, it is apparent that not all marshmallows are born equal. I notice that the ShurFine marshmallow is sweeter and a bit stickier than the traditional spongy marshmallows I was brought up eating and roasting. Marshmallows belong in their own food group, just like popcorn does. If I had to choose just two foods to survive on for a week, I just might pick marshmallows and popcorn.

The marshmallow, being one of the basic elements of the universe, is the only known substance that you can make those Rice Krispy squares with, and it is the only thing that you can stick on the end of a straightened coat hanger, hold over an open flame, and get such a peculiar delectable as a result--a delectable that is in all ways different from the unroasted marshmallow. After roasting, it becomes a crusty-exteriored (sometimes blackened or burning) object with a runny, sticky interior that must be eaten quickly before it gets into your beard or your lap.

A marshmallow is about the only thing an adult will allow a kid to hold over a fire, and a coat hanger makes a fine weapon to swing around after a kid has dropped a flaming marshmallow into the fire.

Nobody eats marshmallows just as candy snacks anymore--except me. Each time I drop by Grant's inconvenience store near my home and purchase a bag of the less-sweet-but-more-nostalgic-than-ShurFine marshmallows, the clerk smiles and says, "Looks like somebody's going to do some roasting." She says this every time I go there, as if I've never been there before. It is the only interchange we ever have. She knows what a marshmallow looks like, but she would not be able to describe me to the police were I to bolt and run with my bag of marshmallows, because she's never looked me in the eye. I'm just the Marshmallow Man who's never been there before and who will never be by again, since each time I go there, it's as if she's surprised all over again that somebody is buying a bag of marshmallows.

I don't roast the things, anyhow. I eat them for small snacks now and then.

Marshmallows are just my way of finding a food that is the kind of unchanged food I've been eating all my life. It's as basic as that. The older I get, the more I look for stuff that hasn't changed.

Besides, marshmallows taste and feel like a soft first kiss...but that's another story

--Jim Reed (c)

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CAN'T STOP MY BRAIN #1

SOMETIMES IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHERE YOU ARE when you wish upon a star, but in some circumstances you can actually embarrass yourself, wishing upon a star out loud, so in those cases it actually does make a difference.

If a dream is a wish your heart makes, does a nightmare count, too?

How do I know that when I talk to the trees they don't listen to me? And what would they care if they did listen?

And where's the proof that every cloud has a silver lining?

And could it possibly be true that if you make just one someone happy that you will be happy, too? What if that someone turns out to be a mugger who can't stand it when someone makes him happy?

Why doesn't "I'll Be Loving You Always" sound as kinky as "I'll Be Loving You All Ways?"

Ever wondered what kind of guns Quaker Puffed Wheat was shot from and whether there'll someday be a class action suit brought by people who have permanent powder burns from eating too much breakfast cereal?

Have you ever actually known an old dog named Tray? Is this some kind of hoax?

Is all larceny petty--what's the cut-off point?

If April showers bring the flowers that bloom in May, what brings the flowers that bloom in June?

Exactly what is the difference in measurement between "missed it by that much" and "missed it by this much"?

Did you ever see a dream walking, and did it terrify you at the time?

Does Freddy Kruger own a nail clipper? Would he associate with the likes of Edward Scissorhands? Or Captain Hook?

No, I'm not on medication, I just can't stop my brain

--Jim Reed

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THE ONLY TWO SONGS YOU'LL EVER NEED

The song rolls in like a damp fog and slowly caresses you, and suddenly you realize what good songs are all about, what ALL good songs are all about.

I'm listening to this Voice and these Lyrics, and without meaning to, I am suddenly not in control of myself. I am suddenly the Lyrics, suddenly the Voice singing those Lyrics. I am the song.

For just three minutes.

But for those three minutes, a good song can seduce you, pull you out of your funk, distract you from your challenges, make you feel a bigger part of the Universe.

Two songs are like that--and they are both performed by the same singer.

Get inside these Lyrics. Don't pre-judge them, just let them take you over. If this works, if you really do become the Lyrics, you will want to hear the Song, and you will especially want to hear the Song sung by the Singer of the Lyrics. Here they are:

********************************************************** IT'S SUNDAY

Drowsy morning sunlight, gentle kisses for my love

It's Sunday, it's Sunday

She needn't waken, I'll fix the eggs and bacon her way While she just dozes

Lately I've taken to bringing her a flower on her tray

She's fond of roses

We'll talk away the morning, read the papers, misbehave

Enjoying each other

The world is ours to play in, we'll take a walk or stay in

Long and lazy hours to have and hide away in for one day

Thank goodness, it's Sunday

It is Sunday, it's Sunday

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This song tells you it knows you've Been There, these Lyrics tell you the writer of the song has Been There. This song holds your hand for three minutes and guides you through Sunday morning.

The other song? Here it is:

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HERE'S THAT RAINY DAY

Maybe

I should have saved

Those leftover dreams

Funny

But here's that rainy day

Here's that rainy day

They told me about

And I laughed at the thought

That it might turn out this way

Where is that worn out wish

That I threw aside

After it brought my love so near

Funny how love becomes

A cold rainy day

Funny

That rainy day is here

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See what I mean? This song, just like IT'S SUNDAY, tells you it knows how you feel, holds you close just long enough to console you, then disappears. We don't know which song came first. Did the singer have love, then lose it? Or did love come just in time, right after loss?

Both these songs were performed by the late Frank Sinatra. IT'S SUNDAY is the only song he recorded with just a guitar accompaniment. It's just right, just Right There. Look for it.

Borrow it from me. Listen to it any way you can.

HERE'S THAT RAINY DAY, recorded decades earlier by Sinatra, puts its arm around your shoulder and tells you that you may feel alone but you're not--there are others feeling the same things in the same way.

Take these two recordings and play them back to back.

This is one rollercoaster ride you'll want to return to, again and again.

--Jim Reed (c)

The songs:

IT'S SUNDAY written by Susan Burkenhead

HERE'S THAT RAINY DAY written by Johnny Burke

Available wherever Sinatra is still remembered.

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HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL IN OUR HEARTS

One of the funniest sight gags I ever saw was in a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby movie back in the 1940’s.

As a tad, it probably didn’t take much to make me laugh, because the aging process had not yet presented life’s back-stories to me.

Anyhow, in this Hope-Crosby Road movie, Hope has pulled off his shoes and is ready to go to bed. Note that Hope and Crosby always slept together, as did Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and a lot of other comic teams. Anyhow, Bob Hope’s toes are showing through the ends of his socks, when Bing says something like, “Better get some shoe polish to cover that up.”

May not sound like much to you, but this was exactly the kind of humor a six-year-old could grasp, and it opened the door to many more sight gags that other comedians would make me laugh out loud over: Abbott and Costello enter a restaurant when the headwaiter says, “Walk this way!” meaning “follow me to your table.” Of course, Costello walks with the same snooty sway as the headwaiter. Now, that was easy to understand and very funny to me and my friends.

Back then, before a theatrical movie began , we’d be entertained by a cartoon, a serial chapter, some previews, and--wonder of wonders--what we called a “Pete Smith Short.” In one of those brief Pete Smith movies, a bus stops, a woman gets off and walks through a shallow mud puddle, then the man behind her disembarks and falls into the puddle over his head. Again, how could life get any funnier than that?

The most beautiful sight gag I ever saw was Red Skelton, at the practice bar with several ballerinas, getting ready to place one unbent leg straight out to rest on the bar, which he does. Then, in an astounding act that looked as logical as any six-year-old’s idea of logic can become, Skelton raises the OTHER unbent leg to place it on the bar at the same time. Now, it happened so fast, in those days before slow-mo’ photography, that you just knew for a split second that it would work. Of course, it didn’t, which makes it funny to this day, in my mind. Even later, when Ed Wynn did the same thing, it again seemed logical.

Now, there are worse things than being brought up watching Bob Hope and his contemporaries do silly things on the silver screen. I NEEDED Bob Hope and company to get me through the tough times, and I grew to expect them to be there when I needed them.

And they always were.

Before you send me to the nursing home to languish away my final days, put a stack of old movies in my lap in the wheelchair, and let me watch them. Bring on all the Benny Hill, Mr. Bean, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby, Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton, Steve Allen, Mort Sahl, Henny Youngman and company stuff you can afford and let me sit there chuckling at the guys who got me through to this age.

If I’m lucky, I’ll take the chuckles and the sight gags with me.

Thanks for the memories.

--Jim Reed (c)

(THE ABOVE STORY APPEARED ON THE EDITORIAL PAGE OF THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS, ALABAMA)

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(EVER WISHED YOU COULD ORDER EVERYTHING YOU WANT FROM THOSE MAIL-ORDER CATALOGS YOU GET EACH DAY? HERE'S THE STORY OF A MAN WHO DID!!!!!!)

SASE

WHEN HE WAS A KID HE USED TO DIG INTO ALL THOSE LITTLE CLASSIFIED ads and small display ads that were everywhere in the magazines he read.

He'd send off for anything he could afford and he'd order anything that was free because he liked to get things in the mail he liked to receive packages and envelopes from faraway places he liked to open those packages never knowing what was inside each of them because by the time they arrived he'd already forgotten what he had ordered.

He liked to read the ads that touted services and items he felt he could never afford and he always kept a mental list of things he would purchase if he suddenly could afford to get anything he wanted and he even wondered how he would feel if he could purchase any and everything he wanted. If that were the situation what could he hope for thereafter what would his dreams be like after he had bought up everything in every ad in every magazine?

As he grew up and passed young adulthood, whizzed by middle age and verged on the edge of ultimate maturity he still liked to dream about those mail-order things he never got when he was a child.

Now he could afford them but where were they? The ads were no longer the same the mail-order stuff he could buy was different.

One day he passed by an old junk shop and saw a stack of magazines the kind of magazines he had when he was oh so young, the magazines that had lurid pulp paintings on their covers the magazines that were chocked full of adventure and fantasy and humor and...ads.

He bought those magazines and went home to dream.

And one day, when he wasn't really thinking too seriously about what he was doing, he bought some old penny postcards and started mailing off requests for free things and more information, to the addresses that existed only when he was young, addresses with zone numbers in them, companies that were so important in their respective communities that they had not needed street addresses just the name of the city and state, you know.

Then, he felt satisfied and drifted back into his dreams of childhood and imagined what it would be like to actually receive mail from those long-departed places.

And one day, the mail started pouring in and he knew at that moment that he was at last in a place where no one could deny him his dreams and fancies and after that he went around smiling to himself quite a bit more than one actually should smile at himself in times like these

--Jim Reed (C)

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MUSIC TO SWIVEL AND SNIVEL BY

There was this Pepsi Cola television commercial that ran over and over again during the 1960's, and oh, I would love to see it again. Just to see if my hormones are still as responsive as they were when I was young and shallow.

This Pepsi Cola commercial was advertising Pepsi Lite, or whatever they called sugarless Pepsi back then, and it had this perfect, PERFECT music in the background, this Bossa Nova style music that drew you into the cathode ray image as surely as the image itself drew you in.

The music kind of loped along, and the subject of the commercial kind of swiveled along, the subject being a young and beautiful woman seen only from the rear as she walked along the beach. Wearing a slight bikini and just swiveling along the beach, gracefully moving as only an unself-conscious young woman can at a certain point in her life, a certain point that comes just seconds before she becomes aware of her beauty and then aware of the effect she has on people and then, aware of the lined-up propositioners who will dog her every day till her beauty fades. The music was as sensual as the woman.

Then there was The Girl from Ipanema, the song that made real and accessible the idea that all young men have of what the woman of his dreams must be like, look like, swivel like.

Listen to The Girl from Ipanema. It's the perfect song for the perfect time in your life, the time when you know that you want to possess everything that's beautiful while at the same time realizing that it is never to be. As my high school buddy Doug Bleicher used to remind me each time I fell in love, "You ain't gonna get any of that!"

Doug Bleicher was correct: Nobody gets any of That, because That is a figment of the imagination, That is a wonderful piece of music with an honest and true lyric that won't go away, a lyric that says, "Appreciate the beauty that's around you, but don't ruin it by touching it...listen to the music, smell the musky fragrance of moist beachside skin, hear the gentle and sensuous strokes that the music applies to your forehead, your ego, your id."

The lyric speaks for every young man who ever yearned for a young woman:

"Tall and tanned and young and lovely

The girl from Ipanema goes walking

And when she passes

Each one she passes

Goes Aaah..."

We all went "Aaah!" each time we saw that Pepsi commercial, each time we heard the lyrics of Yinicius de Morges and Antonio Carlos Jobim, the men who actually knew The Girl from Ipanema. In fact, she is real and still exists! Is that too much for the yearning young reader to handle? Her name is Helo Pinheiro, and she lives in Rio de Janeiro Brazil. She's the one! The one the songwriters saw on the beach that fateful day so long ago.

Perhaps The Girl from Ipanema should never have revealed her true identify. How could she possibly live up to the image she left in our minds?

The painful part comes next, as it must to all young dreamers:

"And when she passes I smile

But she doesn't see

No she doesn't see

She doesn't see me..."

Beauty passes and ignores you, then you spend the rest of your life with a memory more vivid than anything you're going to experience, at least on the cosmic level of Romance and Imagination and Young Dreams.

The Pepsi girl and the girl from Ipanema leave us with hope. They are the kind of women young men would die for, like Helen of Troy or Joan of Arc. They are powerful by their absence and made immortal by the music they inspire, the wonderful, dreamy music.

--Jim Reed (C)

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JIM REED'S FIRST CONTRIBUTION TO THE NEW LITERARY & ART QUARTERLY , BIRMINGHAM ARTS JOURNAL:

THE SISTINE CEILING AS GRAFFITI

Good art is what you like.

Bad art is what you like that I don't like.

Good art is what you don't like that the critics like, so you go along with it and pretend to like it.

Bad art is what the critics don't like that I like, but I don't say anything because, you know, the CRITICS must be right and I must have missed something.

Good art is what gets you a good grade in Art Class, no matter how bad it is.

Bad art is what gets you a bad grade in Art Class, no matter how good it is.

Good art is what you are ready to see when you see it.

Bad art is what may be good but you're seeing it before you're ready to see it.

Good art is, I know what I like, and this is it.

Bad art is, What in the world came over that artist?

Good art is my taste.

Bad art is not my taste.

Good art is art that can't REALLY be good because that very successful and filthy-rich artist produced it.

Good art is what that starving but passionate artist produced--so it has to be good, you know?

Good art must never be judged objectively. You might discard most of it if you did.

Bad art must never be judged objectively. You might discard most of it if you did.

Bad art is necessary, in order to have good art.

Good art is necessary, in order to have bad art.

Bad art is sometimes the best, most enduring art.

Good art sometimes lasts about as long as ducktail haircuts.

Bad art often endures.

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GENTLE TERRORIST

--Jim Reed

In times like these, when leaders of nations are rattling their missiles and red buttons at each other, I long even more for leaders who do not have Rambo and John Wayne and World Wrestling Federation stars as their heroes.

The real heroes and heroines are the gentle people.

Some time back, I wrote a letter to the most gentle of all people, the Gandhi of our times: the late Fred Rogers. Here's my letter to him and his reply to me...

Dear Mister Rogers,

I may be the oldest fan who's ever written to you, but there's a good reason for this--maybe a lot of good reasons.

For one thing, I've never forgotten what it's like to be four years old and ten years old and even 60 years old--which is what I am now. When you get to be all these ages at once, you start trying to catch up on what you've missed, and writing a letter to you is one of the things I've missed doing.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say that I appreciate what you've been trying to do all these years for families and especially for the children who still exist inside those who can remember.

This is a society in which we see many blatantly macho images cast upon us each day, so it's so pleasing to see a gentle man portrayed on television and in books as a hero of sorts.

I have fond memories of my uncles, most of whom were kind and gentle to youngsters, and most of whom gave me a special gift--the gift of humor. You have become the kindly-uncle image and understanding-father image and even the attentive-grandfather image for some people like me, and I for one appreciate it. It kind of reminds me of all the nice times I had with my uncles, my father, and my grandfather.

Following your example and the examples of other gentle men I've admired (ranging from Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding to Bob Keeshan and Ray Bradbury), I've tried to be a decent father, husband, uncle and grandfather. On my best days I believe I've succeeded.

We need more gentle male images in our collective lives, and sometimes I wish we could have an annual meeting of kind people just so we'll know there are some more of us out there.

Keep doing what you're doing so well, and try not to die-- during my lifetime, at least.

Sincerely,

Your friend

Jim Reed

From: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

Dear Mr. Reed,

Your letter meant so much to me and to all of us here in the Neighborhood. Thank you for taking the time to write and share with us some of your thoughts and feelings about our work.

Your letter is an inspiration to all of us.

It was especially heartwarming to know that you appreciate the child in you, and the way the men in your life nourished you when you were growing up. I'm grateful that you feel our Neighborhood has also helped you know that men can be caring, kind, and gentle.

It's wonderful that you've passed those values on to your children, your grandchildren, and to your nieces and nephews.

I've long believed that attitudes and values are "caught," not taught, and I couldn't help but think that everyone in your family is fortunate to have such a loving heritage.

Please give your family our warmest regards. We will remember with great pleasure that the Reeds are a part of our Neighborhood...and that we're a part of yours.

Sincerely,

Fred Rogers

(C)Jim Reed

NOTE: Here's another memory of Mr. Rogers:

Tom Cherones, a former high school classmate (and producer-director of the early Seinfeld television series), worked early-on with Fred Rogers. When I saw him at a High School Reunion last year, I asked whether Fred was as much of a saint as I thought. He replied, "He's even better than you think. He's a wonderful man!"

And one more memory of Mr. Rogers:

Many years ago my daughter's friend Ami told me that she