It has been a long while --- The Storm is Over, I am still here

A quick note - I have been away for some time. Life sometimes takes left turns and leaves us in places we don't expect to be. Such is my story. Without getting into any details that would just bore and embarrass some folks, let's just say I am back for anyone who might care. On wobbly feet I take my first steps having weathered the storm and seeing the day. So, moving just off the tone of this Blog from past postings, let me share a fond reflection, for anyone's comment.

The Writings of Ray Bradbury - One man touching many lives

I was a kid who loved watching movies, especially movies with surprise endings, a twist that might knock you off balance and cause you to stumble in your reasoning because, 'you didn't see that one coming.'

I was also the kid who was 13 and hated to read. I mean I read my assignments and I read my home work, and I could read anything they made me read, but I had to be 'made to read'. I had to have a teacher standing over me threatening my recess or after school imagination fun time. Pretend adventures with G.I. Joes and Major Matt Mason and models of plane, tanks and anything else that wandered into the story at the time. My friends and I hadn't heard of Star Wars, but there had been a TV show called Star Trek that had come and gone. We saw men walk on the moon and watched rockets launch and bring men back, but we had not yet seen Space 1999 and Dr. Who was still a rarity seen only now and then on Public Television.

And then that summer it happened. Someone gave me a copy of, "R is for Rocket". I was unaware that I was reading stuff that had been written twenty years earlier. It didn't occur to me that it was somehow 'out of date'. Each story touched my imagination like nothing before ever did. I sped through the stories, one after another, like someone who had been starved might devour the food they had been dreaming about during their starvation. Before I was aware of what I had done, I was on the prowl for something else, and I found, "S is for Space", "I Sing the Body Electric", "The Illustrated Man" and "The Martian Chronicles". 

 

 

Like someone who had nothing to drink for days, I soaked up each one. Sure this was the beginning of a lifelong love of Science Fiction, and it would be the fuel that would propel me through my Aerospace Engineering studies with my dreams of being an astronaut. But more than anything it awoke the part of my imagination that up until then was dormant and sleeping. I was seeing in my mind's eye and feeling with a heart full of empathy the experiences that Ray Bradbury was describing to me new, even though he had written them some years before I was born.

This experience also began my life's love of books. I mean the physical thing that is a book. They way its heft feels in my hand, they way the page turns, the somewhat musty way it smells when it has been in the shelf for a couple of years patiently waiting for me to rediscover its secrets and rewards in the faithful telling of the author's stories.

And then one summer night, late on a Friday when the local television station showed movie re-runs, I encountered the movie that both frightened me and fascinated me. As Science Fiction goes, I remember thinking it showed it's age. The color was grainy and the sound wasn't clear. The 'special effects' seemed really hokey to this now, sophisticated 14 year old. But it was the story that got me. I couldn't take my eyes, my mind, my imagination away from the story.

Holy goodness, they were burning books. They were burning them because society thought that only snobs and the elite used this archaic method of gaining information or entertainment. Who would want to read a book, especially in the face of the current (then future) technology, entertainment offerings and how it all was packaged. The need for books, the content, the experience of reading and reasoning through an author's thoughts and coming to a common understanding was being questioned and in a 'visual' experiment, was being presented as a shocking concept. The irony was that my first encounter with the 'concept' was a movie of an idea from a book. I watched as Montag, for love of the literature itself and the creative thing it was, became "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" by Edgar Alan Poe.

I rushed out that Saturday morning to the book store. I went to a place where they sold used books, paperbacks in particular. I remember rushing into the section for Science Fiction and Fantasy. There were a few of Mr. Bradbury's books there and right in the front was, "Fahrenheit 451". I felt as if I was about to commit a crime, or join that group out in the woods in the movie, who had dedicated their lives to being the banned books, until books could exist again. I ate the book up. And my life was never the same.

My beloved wife endures a front room that is full from wall to wall and wrapping around again with shelves. And the shelves are stuffed full of books. Hardbacks and paperbacks. New and old. Some previously owned and lightly used, some suffering for their age. Some very old and rare now. All loyal friends waiting for the moment I reach out and open them to read what the author would say, and to start a dialog separated in time and space. Even thought the authors cannot hear me, I do hear them and I question what I read and reason with the thoughts written in their books.

There is so much more to the story, but the point of this effort was to pause and say, "thanks" to one of the people who help push a young punk away from the TV and Movie screen and to go wandering in to the stack and shelves and to learn to love to read, and think, and imagine with some of the most fantastic minds with which God has graced the earth. And just for the record, this Christmas I got my beloved wife a copy of her favorite book. It was Fahrenheit 451, newly released by the Folio Society. She loved it, I only wish it bore Mr. Bradbury's autograph… ah well.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.