MikeKardec
One Too Many
- Messages
- 1,157
- Location
- Los Angeles
Halloween was my favorite holiday as a boy. It came at that perfect time of year for growing older. You could say good-bye to the old days of summer, somehow always the foundation of childhood, and enter a new grade in school with all the sense of pride, anticipation, and fear that that might entail. The beginning of classes, the last blast of heat, the coming of autumn's winds were always The New Year for me.
I celebrated this time as an older and younger kid with the words and ideas of two writers; Charles Schultz and Ray Bradbury, both of whom were true poets of the Fall. Though they spend much of their lives in California's subtle seasons, their October Country was the Midwest, and their work nostalgically explores this most nostalgic of seasons in a purer environment than where they ended up.
In my house planning for Halloween started November 1st, as my mother jokingly reminds me. It was the celebration most geared to engage the imagination, you could be anyone or anything and once you made your choice you were rewarded for it by strangers. I guess it didn't hurt that I grew up surrounded by writers and actors and poets and musicians. It really was the holiday that was planned for all year and was over in an often anticlimactic few hours, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown was the only children's special on TV that I immediately recognized as profoundly true.
Bradbury is still deeply underappreciated. Perhaps it is because too often called a "Science Fiction" author. I love SF but I think the label did him a disservice. There's not much science in his work. He prayed to higher gods. His stories were the essence of nostalgia, always trapped between the future and the past, imagination and memory. Before it occurred to any of us he knew that Mexico was North America's unconscious. He understood the loneliness of the weightlifters on Venice's Muscle Beach. He knew that mysteries could never be dragged into the light, they are an endangered species and must be protected. He understood childhood, dreams, and friendships. He knew that stories were magic ... not magical; actual magic.
They both did.
I had a beagle from the time I was 6 until I was 25. I still have pictures of fanciful rockets, the kind that were being designed before anyone really knew what it took to get into outer space, tacked up in my garage. October in Southern California, which used to denote a distinct change of seasons, is now little more than a prolonging of Summer, we have to wait until Thanksgiving for our Fall. But whenever it comes, and always on Halloween, I cannot avoid thinking of these two magical men and how they filled my young life with so many thoughts and feelings. Their strange nostalgia taught me to appreciate childhood even as I was a child ... and that's a rare gift.
I celebrated this time as an older and younger kid with the words and ideas of two writers; Charles Schultz and Ray Bradbury, both of whom were true poets of the Fall. Though they spend much of their lives in California's subtle seasons, their October Country was the Midwest, and their work nostalgically explores this most nostalgic of seasons in a purer environment than where they ended up.
In my house planning for Halloween started November 1st, as my mother jokingly reminds me. It was the celebration most geared to engage the imagination, you could be anyone or anything and once you made your choice you were rewarded for it by strangers. I guess it didn't hurt that I grew up surrounded by writers and actors and poets and musicians. It really was the holiday that was planned for all year and was over in an often anticlimactic few hours, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown was the only children's special on TV that I immediately recognized as profoundly true.
Bradbury is still deeply underappreciated. Perhaps it is because too often called a "Science Fiction" author. I love SF but I think the label did him a disservice. There's not much science in his work. He prayed to higher gods. His stories were the essence of nostalgia, always trapped between the future and the past, imagination and memory. Before it occurred to any of us he knew that Mexico was North America's unconscious. He understood the loneliness of the weightlifters on Venice's Muscle Beach. He knew that mysteries could never be dragged into the light, they are an endangered species and must be protected. He understood childhood, dreams, and friendships. He knew that stories were magic ... not magical; actual magic.
They both did.
I had a beagle from the time I was 6 until I was 25. I still have pictures of fanciful rockets, the kind that were being designed before anyone really knew what it took to get into outer space, tacked up in my garage. October in Southern California, which used to denote a distinct change of seasons, is now little more than a prolonging of Summer, we have to wait until Thanksgiving for our Fall. But whenever it comes, and always on Halloween, I cannot avoid thinking of these two magical men and how they filled my young life with so many thoughts and feelings. Their strange nostalgia taught me to appreciate childhood even as I was a child ... and that's a rare gift.
