When I was a kid back in the third quarter of the twentieth century I came upon science fiction in the children’s section of the Brooklyn Public Library. And so I read Heinlein’s and Asimov’s juvenile sf stories. As I got a little older I was able to borrow from the adult collection and soon discovered all the golden age authors and some of the newer, edgier writers. But at a certain point I discovered Ray Bradbury. I remember he had two collections called R is for Rocket, S is for Space. But when I read them I found out he wasn’t writing space opera. In fact, some of his stories didn’t seem to be science fiction at all. At the time, I didn’t know what fantasy was. They just seemed to be strange stories. Later on, I found some of his stories showing up on “The Twilight Zone” TV series and this helped me categorize them as something weird and fun. But whatever I called him Bradbury was different from the other writers I knew. Each of his stories had to be evaluated on the merits. Some of his stories lacked fantasy plot elements and at the time these stories seemed lacking in interest. Others were almost horror stories and these kept my attention best. Even his most externally identifiable science fiction stories, “The Martian Chronicles,” didn’t feel like other science fiction stories. Even if there were ray guns and aliens and space ships it didn’t seem as if these were the point of the story. They were more like parables or morality tales. And to a kid this was perplexing. But I always considered Bradbury as something worth reading. He was high value.
Fast forward twenty years. It was the late nineteen eighties. I was in an old used bookstore in Boston during my lunch hour from a design engineering job I had. I hadn’t read any science fiction in a while. I was browsing through a pile of books that had been displayed earlier in the year as summer reading. There was a used hard cover book with a mylar library-type jacket cover on and a cover painting of a little blond haired boy virtually covering the pavement with his chalk drawings of lines and shapes. The book was called “Dandelion Wine” and the author was Ray Bradbury. It was a novel length book and it surprised me because I didn’t remember Bradbury writing many novels. At the time “Fahrenheit 451” was the only one I could think of.
On a lark, I bought it. I put it on my bookshelf and figured I’d get to it when the project I was on slowed down. Well I forgot all about that book and before that project slowed down I had changed jobs and was too busy for reading. It was about nine months later in July, when I picked it up again. I was going on vacation with my wife and kids to Old Orchard Beach, Maine for a week. It’s a very working class old beach resort where middle class people go to sit by the ocean and let their kids dig sand castles and swim. And later on, you can go down to the pier and buy bad pizza and ice cream for your kids and let them get fake tattoos or go down to the amusement park and watch them be centrifuged in the dozen or so kinetic devices that are used to extract dollars from parents and regurgitated food from kids’ stomachs. The several years I brought my young family there are among the happiest memories I have.
Anyway, when the family settled in the beach house at night and the kids settled down to reading or watching the TV I picked up Dandelion Wine. And I was surprised to find I had already read it. But wait, not really, I’d read parts of it. What Bradbury had done was patch together a number of his older stories along with transition scenes that tied them together, and make a narrative about a summer for a boy and his family and neighbors in Green Town, USA circa 1928. What it really was, was an ode to the boyhood Ray Bradbury had lived and imagined in Waukegan, Illinois. He used the memories of his childhood home and passed them through the story writing algorithm in his head and invented a world that struck me as remarkable. Here were the mundane short stories that as a kid didn’t click with me because there were no monsters or space ships. Now they were knitted together to talk about what was magical about being a twelve-year-old boy in a small mid-western town in the early twentieth century with three months of summer vacation ahead of you. They are stories about family and friends and growing up and living and getting old and even dying. And they are mostly about being a kid.
Since that summer I’ve re-read that book a dozen times in whole or part. I mostly read it when I have some vacation time in summer. This year I’ll be sixty. When I read that book I’m not even sixteen, I’m twelve. It’s remarkable. I didn’t grow up in a small town. I grew up on the relatively mean streets of Brooklyn, NY. And I was born forty years after him. But I can understand what he’s saying and feeling in his alter ego character. He’s captured the essence of boyhood in its quintessential form, summer freedom. And the setting is a simpler time and place. It’s idyllic. Not realistic but almost archetypal.
I imagine there are many for whom this type of story has no appeal. It’s not high adventure or technical fun. But if any of this strikes a chord try the book out.