Jimmy Reed

Maverick

Folks known as mavericks aren’t always popular. Unorthodox, non-conformist, and independent-minded, they refuse to go along with the mainstream mindset (often mislabeled as conventional wisdom). Unlike dead fish following a stream’s flow, becoming nothing more than tasty repasts for vultures, mavericks swim upstream in a constant struggle to seek new truths and disprove old ones, with little regard for those who may be offended by their efforts.

Spattered Batter

For boys who love sports, two brass rings are ever in their dreams: first homerun, first touchdown. Despite the clumsiness that came with being a skeleton of about six feet supporting one hundred pounds of flesh, I grabbed both rings in my senior year at Leland High School. But the homerun came at an embarrassing, unforgettable price.

Seasoned With Salt

Early in semesters, I tell students I’m the most un-politically correct individual they’ll ever meet. I explain that using a multiplicity of words (especially pronouns) is diametrically opposed to my composition teaching technique — promoting streamlined, efficient communication in which every word tells, thus clarifying the intended messaged — in which no words retell that told by others.

It Tolls For Thee

When a person leaves church with peace in his heart, and better prepared to face whatever life throws at him, the man behind the pulpit did his job; if he did it really well, his message may remain with those who heard it for a lifetime.

Leave Lyndo Alone

Widow woman Johnson, who lived with her brood of urchins in one of Dad’s rental houses, wasn’t overly bright. When completing her oldest son’s birth certificate, she either didn’t know how to spell the name she’d chosen, or left off the last letter, and dubbed him Lyndo. Even less mentally gifted than his dam, he was an ideal target for trickery, a trait capitalized upon by the tricksters in our secret society, the Mohicans.

Thank You, Montague

As always, I started walking when the sun first lightened the horizon. This daily routine provides time to meditate and to recite poetry.

Onomatopoeiacs

Whether a teacher uses bullying or blandishments, when he jumpstarts college kids into tackling assignments with enthusiasm, he can be certain that even the class sluggards will attempt them.

The Blocks With Which We Build

My father’s huge hands lay across his body, fingers crossed, nails neatly pared and flush with the fingertips, as he had always kept them. Even in death, they seemed ready to build. Staring one last time at those marvelous instruments of precision, I thought about how often they had built things for me. 



Frugality Is Fun

In this materialistic, card-swipe age, frugality and thrift are often ignored. But for those whose parents understood the value of dollars earned through hard work, and taught it to their children, those words are guideposts.

How Pews Produced Profit

When I was a boy, Jaybird often took me to The Old Rugged Cross Chapel, a tiny country church, always packed on Sunday.

Odd Man Ow!

Although Dean and I were only in junior high school, we had already acquired hoodlum habits. We decided it was less trouble to do wrong than right, and more fun, so we devised a coin flipping scam to beat our schoolmates out of their lunch money.

Poker Face

Upon reading Mark Twain’s classic short story, “The Notorious Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County,” I was reminded that a poker face is useful when lying, and assumed my most convincing poker face visage while discussing the difference in momentum and inertia with one of my classes, whose members, like pillars of salt, seemed frozen in a perpetual inertial state.

I’ll Be Your Valentine

Joe was tall, strong, and athletic, and the Leland High girls thought he was oh so handsome, but as much as he longed to, he never talked to any of them. He couldn’t. Around guys he did okay, but around girls, he felt shy, and when he felt shy, he stuttered.

Ti Amo

Early in the Twentieth Century, Pietro Menotti stood on a ship’s deck among throngs of weary, penniless immigrants like himself. Staring into the haze of a summer day, he saw the first of two women who would determine the course of his life. She was the mighty lady with a torch whose message to foreign lands had attracted millions: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”



Love

At age sixteen, I was what singer Don McLean described in “American Pie”: “… a lonely teenage broncin’ buck, with a pink carnation and a pickup truck.” But a miracle happened: Judy agreed to be my date for the Junior-Senior Prom.

Love Is Life

The fresh breeze wafting through the window was gentle and sweet, and the moon’s alabaster face gazed down on lovers everywhere. One of my favorite singers, “Babbling” Brook Benton, crooned across the radio waves, and I thought … I’m a romantic!

Hunnud Pussent

In reading and writing, I found rhyme and reason, but not in arithmetic. As best he could, my mentor, Jaybird, explained it. Although illiterate, he had been taught by life’s most demanding teacher: experience. His wisdom filled many gaps in my education.

Death O’ Fear

During a coffee klatch, an acquaintance chided me for dwelling too much on subjects of a serious nature. A self-proclaimed agnostic, he said, “You Christians, especially you Protestants, take life far too seriously. Life is for enjoyment, which your serious, sober nature preempts.”

By Jove

Among mythological tales about the prophet Tiresias, one holds that he was a female seven years. The sex change resulted when he encountered two snakes entwined in the raptures of lovemaking, and thrashed them with his cudgel. In the curse’s seventh year, he again found the snakes procreating, and thought … if blows mutated me, maybe blows will un-mutate me. Sure enough, his preferred male state was restored.

Look At Me

I first looked at page 186 over a half-century ago; now it’s my computer’s screen saver.