Static Dreams and Picture Shows

Now, there once was a young feller in a town so small you could holler across it and still have breath to spare. This boy, call him Jimmy for the sake of the story, had a mind wider than the town and a knack for dreamin’ larger still.

Most nights, he’d lie in his room, his radio buzzin’ like a hive of bees with no queen. He’d twist the dials, chasing the voice of adventure but mostly catching static.

Static—that’s what Jimmy lived on.

One night, when he was about to give it up as a lost cause, the radio barked to life like an old dog with a new trick. There came a sound, a voice rich with promise, and Jimmy swore it carried the secrets of the world right there in the hum.

Before he could think better of it, he decided then and there: if a fella could saunter out to Hollywood and end up plastered on silver screens, then by thunder, so could he. He’d get his picture in a Picture Show or bust a gut trying.

You might think his folks would cheer him on, but that’s where you’d be wrong. His daddy, a practical man who knew a nickel’s worth but not the weight of a dream, told him to stop all this foolishness. “Jimmy,” he said, “there’s a whole world of hard work waitin’ right here if you’d only set your shoulders to it.”

His mamma, though, well, she wasn’t around to object. She’d gone on to glory some years back, and Jimmy sometimes thought it was her voice riding the static, tellin’ him to go on and give life a wallop.

So, Jimmy did just that. He packed his dreams into a knapsack, kissed his old man on the cheek to the poor fella’s befuddlement, and lit out of town.

Whether he made it big or scraped his meals out of the margins, that’s a tale for another time. But I reckon if you ever find yourself sittin’ in the flickering glow of a Picture Show, and you see some scrappy kid with a wild look in his eyes, you might just be watchin’ Jimmy, finally chasin’ that static down to its roots.