Ray

Is there a nerdy kid who didn't go through a Ray Bradbury phase at some point? I doubt it.

For me, it began in the hot, stuffy, light-filled library of Madison Junior High in Rexburg, Idaho. It was a tall room and the east-facing wall was almost entirely windows. I'd spend my lunch hours in there, slowly walking along the shelves, scanning book spines, looking for something interesting. One afternoon, I came across this:

It looked interesting and I knew that Bradbury wrote some of the short stories in our literature textbook, so I gave it a whirl.

I loved it. I don't know why a 13 year old would be so interested in a work of nostalgia like this but I was. I loved the lyrical descriptions of Green Town (a fictional stand-in for Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury's hometown) and loved how Bradbury managed to wring drama, poetry, excitement out of things like buying a new pair of shoes, picking grapes, or walking home after the movies.

From there, I moved on to The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Toynbee Convector, The Halloween Tree, and The Illustrated Man. Some were hits, some were misses, but I always felt connected to the man himself. In the 80s, there was a tv show based on his short stories and some of his original scripts, and the opening sequence, cheesy and very 80s though it was, fascinated me. I loved his office (to which I doubt he actually took an old fashioned elevator). I've always thought of it as the ideal cave for a writer.



 In late high school, I read one of his newer novels, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and the romance was kind of over for me. It was a weird, self-indulgent novel that just seemed like the work of someone who was too powerful and influential to get a serious editing job from his publisher. Also, he was the keynote at a conference a friend of mine attended and my buddy said he was the worst speaker he'd ever heard at one of those things - scattered, unprepared, obviously used to people thinking that every thought that came from his mouth was genius. So I left Ray for a few years and moved on to other literary loves.

After my mission, I picked up my cheapo paperback copy of Dandelion Wine, reread it, and found I loved it still. For four or five years, I read it every spring as a way of marking the beginning of the warm weather. Even now, it sits on my shelf not far from where I'm sitting now.

Ray Bradbury created some really wonderful things that made my life more interesting and more beautiful. I'll always be grateful to him for that. At 91, he more than deserved some rest.