Days of Wine and Martians, by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

June 6, 2012 Whitney Farmer 2 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an MBA, and is bringing sneakers to France when she goes to visit the gypsies.

School has now ended for most, and the tradition of providing a child labor force to bring in the summer harvest has been forgotten and replaced by newer suspect cultural rituals like abandoning sunlight to watch the latest unsatisfying blockbuster.

It’s the time when you should to buy a new pair of sneakers. Why new? As Ray Bradbury wrote in Dandelion Wine, it’s hard to explain. On page 20, boy hero Douglas mused that “…he felt sorry for boys in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoe of the season, which was better than barefoot…Find friends! Ditch enemies!”

Ray Bradbury eventually left the lake land of Waukegan where his boy’s imagination was stirred and stoked by the world outside his door, and at the Genesee Theatre where he fell in love with film. He came to Los Angeles where his imagination that conjured Martians and Illustrated Men and Mr. Dark could be launched and colonize our planet.

Last night, Bradbury passed away here at the age of 91. It was observed over recent years that he had been confined to a wheelchair following a stroke, but that isn’t the truth of it. He was never confined by the physical world, and he continued to write every day and continued to travel throughout the City and beyond to speak on any soapbox that welcomed his message of loving books and living life. Libraries rightly viewed him as their patron saint as he frequently made appearances and gave readings, a legend giving honor to a public institution that has been humbled by a culture which cares less each year about books and reading stuff.

Bradbury had never been to college, but was well-educated from living a life in libraries, his own works becoming some of the most well-thumbed selections on the shelves. Despite his initial resistance to e-books, he finally agreed to let his Fahrenheit 451 be published if libraries were allowed to download it for free.

My sister saw him speak once as a child on a school field trip in Fresno. He said things about imagination and writing that I believe still are in her soul. He shouted passionately and called the kids to become new Martians and colonize new planets of imagination. How many chose to place their lives under “…’A’ for Adventure…” in that moment, and how many in other small towns have become like the (literary) bees described in Dandelion Wine, smelling like the spice of a million flowers?

Certain types of people live long. Like Bradbury who left this planet at the age of 91, they are the ones who seem to live life large. And like his characters, Bradbury could not be contained by this world.

Quote of the Blog, from Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury…”No person ever died that had a family …”

Image courtesy of Winslow Homer:  “The Nooning”.