Start Of Summer

It’s going to be hot all week but the weekend was just perfect: blue skies, big clouds, just the right intensity of sun. Bradbury-rereading weather for sure:

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.

(The opening of Dandelion Wine, the summer book)

The Martian Chronicles

Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.

The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land….

(Quote from Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, from the opening vignette “Rocket Summer,” set in February 2030; image from Space News. If you didn’t see the Falcon Heavy launch yesterday, go watch it. Incredible.)

Sneakers

Since I got my first pair of Vans back in September, I’ve been buying more sneakers. I just bought my first pair of Converse and this passage from Dandelion Wine popped into my head.

“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes …”

His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”

“Well . . .”

It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water.

“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”

 

Hot

It’s been around 100 degrees here for a week; last year we didn’t even hit that mark. So it seems extra hot somehow and the air conditioning is working overtime because it’s not cooling off at night like it usually does in the desert.

Naturally, there’s a quote for this:

“From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was smoldering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning.”

(By Mr. Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine, of course.)

Words For When It’s Hot

It’s been pushing 105 here, which hasn’t happened in years. So I picked up the “hot” chapter of Dandelion Wine, when Douglas gets sick from the heat and from “too many things happening to him that summer” and the junkman saves him with magic bottled air. (It’s Bradbury. It works when you read it.) Anyway, here is the junkman reading the list of the ingredients of the magic cool air:

He lifted one bottle into the light. “GREEN DUSK FOR DREAMING BRAND PURE NORTHERN AIR,'” he read. “Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April,1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one days in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.”

“Now the small print,” he said, and squinted. “Also containing molecules of vapor from menthol, lime, papaya, and watermelon and all other water-smelling, cool-savored fruits and trees like camphor and herbs like wintergreen and the breath of a rising wind from the Des Plaines River itself. To be taken on summer nights, when the heat passes ninety.”

Friday Bradbury Information

1. I didn’t want to steal my dad’s thunder, but Wednesday also would have been Ray Bradbury’s 92nd birthday. In honor of that, did you see that the Curiosity rover named its landing site after him
2. The video in the post linked to above is really, really great–Ray talking to a roomful of JPL and Caltech engineers in 1971 on the eve of Mariner 9 going into orbit around Mars and then reading one of his poems.
So don’t let the politicians of the world get you down. There’s engineers and the next Ray out there too.

Goodbye, Ray

You’ve probably heard by now that Ray Bradbury, one of my very favorite authors forever and ever, died yesterday at the age of 91. 

He is survived by his four daughters, Susan Nixon, Ramona Ostergren, Bettina Karapetian, and Alexandra Bradbury, and eight grandchildren. His wife, Marguerite, predeceased him in 2003, after fifty-seven years of marriage.

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.

Summer? Are You Here? Will You Stay?

I quoted from Dandelion Wine at the beginning of June last year, and I will do it again this year if that will make this weather stick around. (I was outside a lot this weekend and I think the whole world was doing yard work.)

Once each year, he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelions fires, ants, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last year’s July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower.

I Agree, Ray

I think Ray Bradbury dislikes rain as much as I do–he wrote the wrenching “All Summer in a Day,” about missing out on the only clear weather in a decade, and last night while listening to the rain I remembered “The Long Rain,” about a group of Venus explorers who get lost, go crazy from the constant rain, and die.

I’m not saying that that will happen to me, of course. I’m just saying that if I wanted it to be cold and rainy a week before Memorial Day, I’d live in the Northwest.

(PS, the opera last night was really, really good.)

Happy Birthday, J.S. Bach!

Today the composer I’d listen to if I couldn’t listen to anything else was born. Bach was also my favorite composer to play, back when I was playing (especially this). I’d always think of a Bradbury quote from The Martian Chronicles when I was practicing:

He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast that its farthest chancels were in Ninevah, its farthest dome at St. Peter’s left hand. The music stayed and did not crash in ruin when it was over, but partook of a series of white clouds and was carried away among other lands.