Remembering Mr. Bradbury

Today would have been Ray Bradbury's birthday. When I saw the news of his death on
June 6, 2012, I   thought, "There goes an original." I knew he had been in poor health but still I felt sad that there would be no more new Ray Bradbury books.

Author of many books....

It was Fahrenheit 451 that first made me realize his respect for and love of books.

And it was Bradbury Speaks that left me no doubt that he was an original and did not hesitate to speak his mind.

""Plant me in a room with two hundred chaps at two hundred computers,

give me a number two Ticonderoga pencil

and a ten-cent Mohawk Red Indian pad,

and I will outthink and out create the whole damn bunch."

"So instead of treating chat-show hosts as Cinderellas,

tell them they are ugly sisters whose lips spew not diamonds and emeralds

but spiders, frogs, and toads."

"Shut off the set. Write your local TV newspeople.

Tell them to go to hell.

Take a shower.

Go sit on the lawn with friends."

Phew! Ever felt like that yourself after watching the local news? Or a talk show? But there was a softer side to Mr. Bradbury.

The night that I heard of his death, I took my favorite Bradbury book to bed with me. I'm talking about Dandelion Wine, the mostly autobiographical fictionalized account of his summers as a boy.

He remembered exactly what it was like to be a boy wearing a brand new pair of tennis shoes.

"Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted.

They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles

and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness.

Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden.

The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees

and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes.

Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer."

Mr. Bradbury showed a distinctly softer side when he wrote about wives, and I believe in his sincerity on this subject as he was married to the same woman all his life until her death eight years before his.

"She sat down next to him on the swing,

in her nightgown,

not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen,

not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty,

but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness,

the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question."

He wrote beautifully of his grandmother.

"She was a woman with a broom or a dustpan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand.

You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it."

"She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys...

Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat,

minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted..."

"...and stirred."

"She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, 

and--grown old."

Mr. Bradbury understood about women growing old. In what was the post I've been most proud of on this blog, I let Mr. Bradbury speak. I believe he would have been proud to have the old photograph I chose to accompany his quote on that post. If you would care to visit that post [here], I think you will understand why I miss Mr. Bradbury.

I'm remembering you today, Mr. Bradbury.