Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Ebook292 pages4 hours
Dandelion Wine
By Ray Bradbury
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this ebook
Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.
Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.
Come and savor Ray Bradbury's priceless distillation of all that is eternal about boyhood and summer.
Author
Ray Bradbury
In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.
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Reviews for Dandelion Wine
Rating: 3.9808917019108283 out of 5 stars
4/5
157 ratings93 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title well thought out and well written. It teaches about life and death and cherishing the moments you have. It envelops the reader in a sense of nostalgia and offers valuable lessons."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The book was well written and an easy read... well kind of! The easy to read part that is. This tale of two sisters was quite hard on my heart at times, the cruelty of older siblings to the younger and the added cruelty of a mother who only wanted her first born "perfect" daughter in the first place was quite a tear jerker for me. Older sister Pia makes an unexpected visit to younger Muriel and old wounds and long hidden secrets come forth like Pandora's box. I found 80% of the book quite enjoyable and read it quickly. The parts I didn't like? The somewhat of a happy ending- in the relationships that the author discloses in this book there would not be any healing between mother and daughter. I have lived it. Sure Muriel can come to grips with her past and become free of it, but orange trees will never grow strawberries. The touches of religion were at times quite ludicrous and very one sided. One can simply not equate the the one true God of the Bible with religion of any sort and if the author would have been more open minded she would have seen that.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mary Hogan's "Two Sisters" examines the relationship between golden-child Pia and her dowdy younger sister, Muriel. A confluence of family history and tragedy serves to crystalize the complexities of dysfunctional sisterly love, and the difficulties of relational restoration even between well-meaning individuals. The past is a heavy chain to break.I didn't particularly enjoy this story. For as modest a length as it is, it took a ridiculous amount of time to get through. I found the alternating points of view, flip-flopping chronology, flat characters, and varying verb tenses distracting and irritating. However, what did strike me about Hogan's story were the comments in her afterword in which she explains her inspiration for the book. It turns out this is a personal mediation on a lost relationship of her own, and when I take this into account, I find it hard to be quite so harsh a critic. It is one thing for an author to write about a topic for shock value simply to gain readers; it is quite another to draw readers in who might have similar experiences and say, You are not alone. Ultimately, my empathy doesn't negate the need for better editing, or the need to more fully flesh out of characters and plot. Nevertheless, I hope the author takes these critiques with a grain of salt; if writing this story helped restore her own heart and mind, then it is a worthy effort indeed.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed the book thoroughly. The characters were real and relatable. As I read it, I felt like the author we sharing her own story. Recommended.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sisters can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. I know because I have a sister. As complicated as the sibling relationship can be all on its own, what happens when a parent complicates it? When the older sister is clearly the favorite and the younger sister was unwanted from the start and never allowed to forget that she was superfluous to a family that already had the perfect daughter for the mother and a son for the father? Mary Hogan tackles the complicated family dynamics and sibling relationships that result in such a situation in her new novel, Two Sisters. Muriel has always been the chubby, unstylish sister lost in the golden glow of her perfect, golden, beautiful, older sister Pia. Even into adulthood, she is marginalized in her family, only noticed for her faults, real or perceived. She passively avoids dealing with the toxicity of her mother and the cold perfection of her sister by living in Manhattan on her own and making any excuse she can to stay there away from them. But when her sister calls her and insists on lunch, she can't come up with a good enough excuse to skip, and that lunch will change everything. Pia doesn't act like herself at all and, at the end of the day, she drops a bombshell on Muriel that makes Muriel reconsider her relationship with her sister, how it actually was, how she wished it had been, and how she wants it to be in the future. Alternating with Muriel's grappling with Pia's devastating secret, is the story of their parents' courtship and marriage. Lidia and Owen have never been particularly compatible in Muriel's memory and as a child she witnessed things that she shouldn't have. She has always kept her shocking secrets to herself though, despite her mother's poisonous behavior towards her and her father's complete indifference to both his daughters. The tale of Owen and Lidia's lives coming together in a whirlwind and the circumstances that led to their marriage explains a lot about their dissatisfaction, remoteness, and the separate lives they have led since Muriel was a young girl, if not about their different treatment of each of their children. This family is incredibly dysfunctional. With parents who barely acknowledge each other, a mother who actively dislikes her, an older sister who treats her hatefully, a father who is emotionally absent, and a silent older brother who passes through her life with no more substance than a shadow, it is no wonder that Muriel feels unloved and desperately craves kindness. She is vulnerable and needy but the reader can't help feeling sorry for the terrible lack in her childhood. Lidia Sullivant is reprehensible in her treatment of her youngest daughter and Pia is complicit in the ugliness. And yet Muriel is resilient enough, inherently good enough, to offer them both forgiveness, even as their behavior doesn't substantially change throughout the book nor do they show much, if any, remorse about the way that they treated her growing up. The novel's plot really hinges on Muriel's relationships with her mother and sister and the enormous secrets she carries for both of them. Her father and brother figure into the family dynamic very little and aside from making Muriel feel left out or abandoned, just as Lidia and Pia's closeness does, their impact on her in any other substantive way is negligible. It is hard to care about any of the characters besides Muriel and that makes it tough to read about the regrets Muriel carries with her. Not one of her family deserves an inch of emotion spent on them, especially not from her. Aside from Muriel, none of the characters was particularly complex or nuanced and the almost complete absence of her brother and father from the narrative felt like an oversight, even though she was as good as invisible to them, especially given a pivotal scene with her brother, the only scene with Logan, later in the book. The secrets are rather predictable and the ending is far too redemptive for the story that precedes it even as the reader roots for Muriel to be able to find the love she needs from her family. This dysfunctional drama is ultimately a quick and easy read about family, forgiveness, and the relationships we want versus the relationships we have with those closest to us.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was a pretty okay but kind of sad book about sisters who were never close and the youngest one of them felt unloved and unwanted by her parents and siblings her whole life. The mother was a cold, unfeeling not nice person....I think she and Joan Crawford would have been good friends. Some issues were resolved by the end but one relationship was barely touched on, that with the father. Also, there seemed to be too many product brand names mentioned, I felt like a time or two I was reading and advertisement for them...
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I had a lot of trouble getting into this book. It just seemed incredibly plodding. When Pia comes to New York and tells her sister Muriel what is happening to her, the story takes off and I was more interested. That said, I found the plot to be predictable and pretty much standard chick lit stuff. No big deal.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Sisters: A Novel is a sad and emotional tale of all the things that go wrong in a family when the two parents feel trapped and disappointed with the lives they're living.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The story of two sisters who were never close. One was loved by their parents, the other was for the most part ignored and became the keeper of the family secrets. When a life changing event happens both women try to find a way to make their relationship better and in the process, one sister finally finds out who she really wants to be.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Sisters is a story about a dysfunctional family and the affects it had on the children. It is told by the main character, Muriel. Muriel is the third born child in her family and was overlooked by her parents. The story starts with Muriel in the present day and flashes back to her troubled childhood and the flawed relationship she had with her family. Secrets are kept throughout Muriel's childhood and revealed as the story unfolds.For the most part this was a very sad story. Muriel's mother Lydia was a wicked woman and her behavior disrupted the lives of all of the family members. I would recommend this book. I was touched by the author's explanation at the very end about how she developed the idea for this story.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I had to force myself to keep reading this book because I had committed to doing an early review. Overall, the story line was an interesting, if tragic, view of a dysfunctional family from the viewpoint of the youngest daughter. However, the character and relationship development was almost non-existent! You are told about series of events, but you never really got a feel for 'who' anyone was, what they were thinking, how they felt about things. The 'romance' of Owen and Lidia was cut and dried. Pia's relationship with her husband was initially portrayed as rather cold, then suddenly warm? You did feel Pia's distress at what she was going thru, but you never saw how she evolved from the mean sister to a briefly caring sister....what happened in the in between years? And was she even sincere? And the brother's character was almost non existent save for a few lines..... and you never got a feel for if Muriel would stay connected with him. That could have been developed more. You never quite get a feel about who Lidia is, from the time she meets Owen, and even to the end of the story. Yes she shows some remorse, but you pretty much disliked her for how she treated her family. Owen's feeling are briefly displayed as he meets Lidia, but after that, he is only a background figure. There was way too much description of meaningless details...about clothing, the city and landscape, rooms, and on and on until i found myself skimming to find a point of some actual story line!! Also, the figurative language & metaphors about drove me nuts! Examples: 'branches resembling Brussels sprouts'... 'squinting like a newborn in morning sunlight'.....'her shoulders melted into 2 parentheses'....'His mind flashed platitudes like a flip book'.....'His tongue felt like a soggy loaf of bread'......'as if a rabble of monarch butterflies had just done a flyby'.......'like the Tin Man creaking down the yellow brick road'....'toes fanned out the hood on a frill-necked lizard'.......'like it was the infant son of Christ'.....'like one of those shrink wrapped turkey legs they sell at Price Right'......'like a melted Creamsicle'.......'Owen was as tiny limbed as a t-rex'...... 'her big toe stuck out of her peep-toe pumps like an unpedicured bratwurst'.....'satin dresses that rippled across the stage like cake icing'.....'Hudson river flickered in the afternoon sunlight like a new box of tinsel' ...'flickered past like a flip book'.....'Like a giant polka, people automatically sidestepped each other'.....'Muriel let her face hang there like bolt of sateen.'......'her mother's lips stiffen into a twig'....'they moved as fluidly as seahorses in the ocean'.....'in the clear Connecticut sunlight it glowed like a retouched photo'.....'a giant island sat in the center like a square spaceship'....'the hollows of her cheeks could house a stack of teabags'.....'The 96th st subway station arched into the gray sky like a Star Wars storm trooper helmet'......'her lips parted as if a stranger had walked up and yanked her hair'...... I could pull out a couple dozen more such examples of poor writing here, but won't! How these got past an editor, I have to wonder. They sound very 'Jr High' ish!! Too 'cutesy' for any serious writer! Over and over these distracting phrases keep coming, ad nauseam, and add nothing to the story, but they are so annoying! This was rather a tedious book to read.....but could have been a great story is there had just been more development of the characters, and more their relationships, and less detail to scenery, and cut the metaphors OUT!!! I have rarely read a book in which I felt more detached from the characters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I found this book to be a quick but uneventful read. Hogan tells the story of a dysfunctional family through the eyes of an adult Muriel (the youngest child) reflecting back on events of her childhood. The past is interspersed with present sad family events, and ultimately reveals 'secrets' that I thought were pretty obvious from early on in the narrative. I was also disappointed by the quick and neat wrap-up at the end of the novel - I'm all for the idea of family forgiveness, and of giving people a second (or thirtieth) chance, but Muriel's struggles throughout the book are trivialized at the end.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Muriel Sullivant is the third child in a family of convenience. The child who was a mistake. Throughout her life Muriel has watched as her older sister Pia, the perfect one, has been everything her mother ever wanted and as her brother Logan has been everything their father ever wanted. Muriel was pretty much left to raise herself, never truly feeling loved or wanted. The few times she felt loved or wanted she would later find out that she was being used to further whatever the person giving her the attention needed her for. Regularly she was bullied and belittled by her sister and mother and ignored by her father and brother. She was threatened into keeping secrets and then blamed whenever anything went wrong, whether she was involved or not. The family had serious dysfunction issues. As Muriel grew into an adult, bearing the weight of never being enough, unloved, carrying many family secrets she wondered why no one loved her, what had she done? One day her sister Pia came to visit and the world they knew would never be the same again. Old secrets and situations would be discussed, new secrets would surface. Adult sisters would finally come together.As sisters finally became sisters and relationships were put on the fast track to healing Muriel would find out after all of these years why she was treated the way she was and how none of it was ever her fault. I found this book to be very emotional and hard to begin. The first section was the hardest because it was written in several time frames. If the author had made each chapter a different time frame, I think I would have had an easier time. But not knowing from one paragraph to the next if I was going to be in Muriels' past or present, or her parents past or present made it hard to follow at first. I understood that the author was trying to show history in relationships but I felt it was a little erratic. I did find that there was enough within the first section to peak my curiosity and make me want to continue reading. Once I made it to Section II it became smoother in the transitions which made for a much more enjoyable read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While I enjoyed reading Two Sisters by Mary Hogan, there was one aspect of the novel that never felt believable to me: the marriage of Muriel's parents. I had a hard time believing that they dated and wed in the 1980s considering their attitudes and beliefs about marriage itself. Without dropping any spoilers, I just want to say that their relationship would have made more sense had it been set in the 1960s instead.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Strange but almost believable things happen to Douglas Spaulding in the summer of 1928: a neighbors attempts to invent a happiness machine, a young boarder falls in love with someone several times his age, the junkman sells fresh air for nothing, folks leave Green Town willingly and unwillingly. If this genre is magical realism, there's definitely more realism than magic. A willingness-to-suspend-disbelief kind of realism with a good dose of philosophy thrown in, but realism nonetheless.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book really makes you experience the nostalgia of Summer time and teaches so much about life and death and learning to cherish the moments you have while letting go of the past. This is one that envelops you ❤️
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the best book ever written. Here I am at 73 years old and blessed enough to have met Douglas and Tom.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Not good but some interesting parts. Very predictable. Really.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nostalgia stories are interesting, to see how people lived in the past. But things in those times were not as pleasant as they seem, at least not for everyone. And at this time, it is hard to read about life in past times, when there are so many who are unable to deal with the reality of the present and the future, and seek to return us to the past.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is well thought out as well as being well written. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to [email protected] or [email protected]
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Delightful story of a boy and the magical summer of 1928.I read this book during our polar winter storms & it transported to the joys of summer! Summers and how children used to spend their days,the simple joys of life.Brothers Tom and Doug & their adventures with family,friends and the townspeople! Absolutely delightful!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ray Bradbury is a master storyteller and I thoroughly enjoy his works.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was not what I was expecting. I thought it would be more about Douglas and his summer of dandelion wine. But it was about all the people in the town - almost like a collection of short stories. Themes include aging, lost youth, horror, tenderness, wonder.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a book to be savored and enjoyed bit by bit. A delightfully written series of short stories with a thread that runs between many chapters. The prose is excellent and keeps your attention. A worthy read!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ray Bradbury is perhaps best known for his fantasy, horror, science fiction novels; although the author, himself has stated that he does not write science fiction and that only one of his works--Fahrenheit 451--was science fiction while other works like the Martian Chronicles are fantasy.
Bradbury rarely steps out of those genres, but he did with a wonderful little novel that was one of his first in 1957. Dandelion Wine is a semi-autobiographical novel of Bradbury's childhood. The novel was originally produced as a set of short stories, but Bradbury brought the stories together and fleshed out some of the details to create the novel.
Dandelion Wine pulls readers into a 12-year old boys summer and reminds us how, for children, everything is magical. Through the eyes of Douglas Spaulding we, as readers, get to experience the magic and wonder of the essence of a well-lived summer when Douglas discovers he is indeed "alive".
This is easily one of my favorite Bradbury works because Dandelion Wine captures and exemplifies Bradbury's masterful control over and use of prose. There is something fantastic and magical about the words that dance across the page and infuse the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois as Bradbury brings the town and its inhabitants to life. I think this particular text showcases just what a great writer Bradbury is. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bradbury is a master storyteller. His grasp of plotting, characters and language never cease to amaze me. A must read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A delicious book that is as much about childhood as it is about adulthood. A veritable candy shop of nostalgia, wisdom and humour.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Escape to the summer of 1928, Green Town, Illinois through the experiences of youth in those magical moments where reality and something more rushes in transforming each moment into where what is real and what isn't converge. Dandelion Wine is the metaphor for packing all the joys of summer into one bottle. Ray Bradbury goes Lake Wobegon. wonderful! read and remember your own magical childhood moments of simple routine mixed with joy and spontaneity.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was afraid at first that I had outgrown the Bradbury magic that let me enjoy his stories so much in my teens and early 20's. This starts off a little too far over the top, but I rather quickly got sucked in to that summer of 1928 in small town Illinois and the way it was for a 12 year old boy discovering the world, life and death. It was the small things in here that I really liked. There truly is magic in the writing in this book. Let yourself fall into it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Magnificent! Picked this up as a Kindle Daily Deal. It's always been one of my read-every-year favorites. Bradbury is just amazing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For this reader, Kansas native and Ohio resident of 20 years, few premises could offer more charm than Ray Bradbury’s quest for the eternal epiphanies of small town life. The style blends homespun and mystical wisdom through encounters with a dying great-grandmother, long-lived Civil War colonel, a mechanical tarot witch, and other colorful characters. In picaresque fashion, these adventures befall a protagonist who conveys boyish innocence as he learns that he is ALIVE and hence must one day DIE—a perennial insight that retains much freshness in Bradbury’s treatment. I loved it!
Book preview
Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM:
an introduction
This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.
I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.
First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.
Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.
What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.
So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.
It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
And then I wanted to call back what the ravine was like, especially on those nights when walking home late across town, after seeing Lon Chaney’s delicious fright The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and leap out and grab me, shrieking, so I ran, fell, and ran again, gibbering all the way home. That was great stuff.
Along the way I came upon and collided, through word-association, with old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.
Along the way, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved. For I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother ditched
him.
Along the way, I found myself in the basement working the wine-press for my father, or on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion load and fire his homemade brass cannon.
Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to surprise myself, I might add. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.
So, I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.
I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town.
But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.
And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.
As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Perhaps a new poem of mine will explain more than this introduction about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.
Here’s the start of the poem:
Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my birthplace:
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:
So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods’ bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh …
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supersede
While Grandmama in rocking chair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
Waukegan/Green Town/Byzantium.
Green Town did exist, then?
Yes, and again, yes.
Was there a real boy named John Huff?
There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn’t go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love.
Was there a Lonely One?
There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured.
Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have already answered that.
Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera.
So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.
Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first novel.
A final memory.
Fire balloons.
You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath.
But in 1925 Illinois, we still had them, and one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is the last hour of a Fourth of July night forty-eight years ago when Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.
I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.
No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn’t they? And that one is me.
The wine still waits in the cellars below.
My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.
Why and how?
Because I say it is so.
Ray Bradbury
Summer, 1974
Dandelion Wine
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town. At night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse in all directions over swarming seas of elm and oak and maple. Now …
Boy,
whispered Douglas.
A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoarfrosted ice-house door. He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandma’s kitchen.
But now—a familiar task awaited him.
One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.
He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled.
The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish.
Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger.
There, and there. Now over here, and here …
Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.
Everyone yawn. Everyone up.
The great house stirred below.
Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!
He waited a decent interval. Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes!
The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.
Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around!
The bleak mansions across the town ravine opened baleful dragon eyes. Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn!
Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets.
Ready John Huff, Charlie Woodman?
whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. Ready!
to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees.
Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.
Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.
The sun began to rise.
He folded his arms and smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It’ll be a fine season.
He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.
Doors slammed open; people stepped out.
Summer 1928 began.
Crossing the lawn that morning, Douglas Spaulding broke a spider web with his face. A single invisible line on the air touched his brow and snapped without a sound.
So, with the subtlest of incidents, he knew that this day was going to be different. It would be different also, because, as his father explained, driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, there were some days compounded completely of odor, nothing but the world blowing in one nostril and out the other. And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he nodded, smelled as if a great and nameless orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills to fill the entire visible land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds. Momentarily, a stranger might laugh off in the woods, but there was silence....
Douglas watched the traveling land. He smelled no orchards and sensed no rain, for without apple trees or clouds he knew neither could exist. And as for that stranger laughing deep in the woods …?
Yet the fact remained—Douglas shivered—this, without reason, was a special day.
The car stopped at the very center of the quiet forest.
All right, boys, behave.
They had been jostling elbows.
Yes, sir.
They climbed out, carrying the blue tin pails away from the lonely dirt road into the smell of fallen rain.
Look for bees,
said Father. Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens, Doug?
Douglas looked up suddenly.
You’re off a million miles,
said Father. Look alive. Walk with us.
Yes, sir.
And they walked through the forest, Father very tall, Douglas moving in his shadow, and Tom, very small, trotting in his brother’s shade. They came to a little rise and looked ahead. Here, here, did they see? Father pointed. Here was where the big summer-quiet winds lived and passed in the green depths, like ghost whales, unseen.
Douglas looked quickly, saw nothing, and felt put upon by his father who, like Grandpa, lived on riddles. But … But, still … Douglas paused and listened.
Yes, something’s going to happen, he thought, I know it!
Here’s maidenhair fern,
Dad walked, the tin pail belling in his fist. Feel this?
He scuffed the earth. A million years of good rich leafmold laid down. Think of the autumns that got by to make this.
Boy, I walk like an Indian,
said Tom. Not a sound.
Douglas felt but did not feel the deep loam, listening, watchful. We’re surrounded! he thought. It’ll happen! What? He stopped. Come out, wherever you are, whatever you are! he cried silently.
Tom and Dad strolled on the hushed earth ahead.
Finest lace there is,
said Dad quietly.
And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn’t sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom. Dad stood comfortably saying this and that, the words easy in his mouth. He made it easier by laughing at his own declarations just so often. He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! the waterfall of birdsong beyond those trees!
Now, thought Douglas, here it comes! Running! I don’t see it! Running! Almost on me!
Fox grapes!
said Father. We’re in luck, look here!
Don’t! Douglas gasped.
But Tom and Dad bent down to shove their hands deep in rattling bush. The spell was shattered. The terrible prowler, the magnificent runner, the leaper, the shaker of souls, vanished.
Douglas, lost and empty, fell to his knees. He saw his fingers sink through green shadow and come forth stained with such color that it seemed he had somehow cut the forest and delved his hand in the open wound.
"Lunch time, boys!"
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