Farewell, Summer by Ray Bradbury

"Farewell, Summer. Here it is. October 1st. Temperature's 82. Season just won't let go. The leaves won't turn." from Farewell, Summer by Ray Bradbury

I read Farewell Summer on the last day of summer. 

My electric company had sent me a warning email that my bill would be twice as high as last month's. We had been running the air conditioner for weeks because of the high humidity and 90-degree weather, accompanied by thunderstorms. The bees were visiting the Sedum Autumn Joy since most of the other flowers had gone, except the roses which are still blooming their hearts out.

But a few days later as I write this post the change has come. We expect our first frost. The apple tree has some yellowing leaves. I left my window open last night but pulled my quilt up to my chin. The house was chilled this morning. Farewell, Summer.

If only life were only about the changing of the seasons, but with the change comes the recognition that life is moving on, the months are ticking off another year. I am growing old. I tried to hang onto youth, like Doug and Tom in Bradbury's fictional Illinois town, resentful and obstinate, sure I would never grow old. I would die first. Instead, I turned sixteen and suddenly I was married and then I was old.

A sequel to Dandelion Wine, written 55 years later, Bradbury returns to childhood's grappling with the awareness that comes after age nine, the knowledge that we grow old and die. Doug and Tom go to war with the old men. They think they know how the old men control the boys' destiny so they become men. Steal the chess pieces! Break the clock! 

Couched in the language of war, the last chapter is Appomatix. Mr. Quartermain, the old man who resented the boys, and Doug who waged war on the old men sit down together. 

"What is it you want to know?" Quartermain asks Doug.

"Everything," said Douglas. 
"Everything?" Quartermain laughed gently. "That'll take at least ten minutes."
"How about something?" asked Douglas finally.
"Something? One special thing? Why, Doug, that will take a lifetime. I've been at it a while. Everything rolls off my tongue, easy as pie. But something! Something! I get lockjaw just trying to define it. So let's talk about everything instead, for now."

I was so blown away by the writing, the word choice, the insights, I could have highlighted pages of favorites sentences. For #SundaySentence hosted on Twitter by author and 'book evangelist' David Abrams, I shared this lovely quote:

Grandpa's library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Last year I read Dandelion Wine with book club, my first reading since I was a teenager. Then I reread Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I also last read as a teenager.

Frankly, I could easily make it a habit every year of reading Dandelion Wine and Farewell, Summer both on the Autumn Equinox. The older I get, the more I have to learn from children.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

"It was a time after first discoveries but not last ones. It was wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing. It was the new sweetness of men starting to talk as they must talk. It was the possible bitterness of revelation."--Something Wicked This Way Comes

For October I decided to read Something Wicked This Way Comes, my interest in revisiting Ray Bradbury piqued by my book club's reading Dandelion Wine in September.

When I was a teenager I read most of Bradbury, and passed my paperback books to my younger brother when he was in a reading slump.

But Bradbury is wasted on the young! The young may get the mystery and the fantasy, but some things require a view that only age can bring. An October view, as it were, from the perspective of a fifty-four-year-old father.

One October night a carnival comes to town and Will and Jim have snuck out of their houses to see the carnival being set up. They observe it's secrets and understand the evil going on, endangering their lives. The circus master Mr Dark, the Illustrated Man, searches for the boys. The boys have only Will's father, the library janitor, and their own ingenuity to protect them.

Wil and his father are unable to sleep, and their 3 am talk it is a most beautiful scene. Will asks his father about goodness and happiness. Although he only understands a small portion of his father's meaning, he has never heard his father talk so much and is transfixed. His father shares all he has learned about life.

"Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else."  

"We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do both..."

"Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. you can't act if you don't know...we got to know all there is to know about those freaks and that man heading them up. We can't be good unless we know what bad is..."

The carnival, like life, has its enticements, the pink cotton candy stickiness; and it has frightening deformities and sinister side shows, the house of mirrors that confuses those who enter and reflects back what we do not want to see.

"...here comes the carnival, Death like a rattle in one hand, Life like candy in the other; shake on to scare you, offer one to make your mouth water."

In his search for the boys, Mr. Dark finds Will's dad in the library. He offers the gift of reversing time, and then he threatens Will's dad with death.  Looking death in the face, Will's father laughs and robs evil of its power.

"Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve."

Death isn't important, it is what happened before death that counts, Will's father knows.

After vanquishing Mr. Dark and his cohorts, Will's dad knows it is just the beginning. "God knows what shape they'll come in next...We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fights just begun."

The circus sideshow freaks, the witches and the living dead, are vanquished but other 'autumn people' will arise and we must always be on our guard, ready to stand up to them. Our weapon is laughter and joy.

*****

I wrote a poem long ago, but many years after reading Somethng Wicked This Way Comes, and yet I wonder what part of Bradbury's novel remained in my subconscious when I wrote it.

Circus Life
by Nancy A Bekofske

The thing about life is
it’s like a three ring circus.
I can almost smell the greasy odor of popcorn,
feel the sticky web of cotton candy
attaching itself to the skin,
see the wild beasts on stools and
the dangerous, captivating dares of the trainer--
hyperbolic symbol of the little daily risks we take
just going to work or school or to mail a letter.
The bareback riders in pink tights and tutus
recall the various temptations
flashing their thighs at us.
The sad clowns fall down over and over,
suffer the trials of water and fire, spurring laughter.
That's what life is all about:
trial, temptation, danger,
and the deep haw-haw of laughter.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I first read Dandelion Wine in my teens, back in the late 1960s. I had read through all of Bradbury's books, and a few years later when my younger brother needed a boost in his interest in reading I gave him my collection. It revitalized his interest. And my son has also read this novel, and most of Bradbury as well.

Because it had been so many years since I had read this book, when a local book club chose it for their monthly read I knew I had to fit it into my heavy reading schedule.

Reading Dandelion Wine in my mid-sixties was very different from reading it as a teenager. I read it in small bites, drawing it out over several weeks. I would pick it up and read a few paragraphs, or pages, or a scene, and my heart would hurt and my mind would thrill and I had to let the feeling just be for a while.

The nostalgia overwhelmed me. I was not alive in 1928, the year in which the book is set, and I never lived in this small Indiana town with the trolley and front porches with swinging chairs on creaking chains. Two Black Crow records and stereoscoptic viewers are antiques to me. But I felt the perfect beauty and preciousness of the time and place, of which the protaganist, Doug, finds himself suddenly aware.

Doug is a boy who is on the cusp of growing up, and has just discovered he "is alive." The other side of that knowledge also comes to him over the summer, for all that he wants to deny such knowledge: all that is alive will die, and all that is changes and passes.

"...does everyone in the world..know he's alive?...I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh, I sure hope they know." 

Douglas takes a notebook and makes lists about life: Rites and Ceremonies, the cycle of known things, and Discoveries and Revelations/Illuminations/Intuitions, what he is just learning about life.

The passage that most hurt with bittersweet truth was when Douglas's friend John notices the colored glass in the attic window of a house. "I never saw them before today," John marvels. "Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn't see them?" "You had other things to do," Douglas responds. John is upset, "It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?" And since John is moving, it upsets him all the more, and he makes Douglas promise to never forget him.

I set my tablet down and looked around me. It is the end of August and the days are growing shorter. I felt the urge to go out, do something, see something new. Life is passing by, and here I am caught in the web of 'something else' and missing the colored glass in a window I pass every day. There are so few years left me, so few years of health and ability, and what am I missing? What have I not noticed?

In the forward, Bradbury writes, "I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiement and was statles when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blustered 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."

He uses the wine metaphor as a way of fathering "images of all my life, storing them away, and forgetting them." He plunged his memories and they bloomed into flowers that were captured in this rare vintage of Bradbury wine. I am so glad to have sipped it again.

"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 cat 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."