The Illinois writer Ray Bradbury grew up in Green Town. So did Ernest Hemingway. For Bradbury, Green Town was Waukegan. For Hemingway, it was Oak Park. I can’t imagine a greener town than Oak Park, where summers are filled with cicada and songbird choruses, front porches and fireflies. But most us grew up in some Green Town or another.
Last Sunday morning in the park, I read Bradbury’s introduction to his book, Dandelion Wine, as lovely an introduction as you’ll find for the best book about summer ever written. It’s also about growing up and discovering, to his surprise, that he’s alive.
“Thus I fell into surprise,” Bradbury writes. “I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of the bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered 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. …”
To his surprise, he found enough in his past to fill his book with poetic, back-looking wonder.
“I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old …”
Much of his other writing focused on futurism, the fantastic, and life’s darker side (Something Wicked This Way Comes). With Dandelion Wine, however, set in the semi-autobiographical community of Green Town, he plumbed the past and the positive.
“Waukegan,” he said, “is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old house is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit.”
I’ve often wondered why Hemingway didn’t revisit his Green Town, if only in his mind. He was born here, grew up here. If he had written of his childhood as he saw fit, it might have done him a world of good.
As it did for Bradbury.
“Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. … And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at that damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now I must remember that.
“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 the trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was 12 and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first ‘novel.’”
He ends his intro with a lingering memory from one magical Fourth of July:
“Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped, red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself. …
“I see my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this. No one said anything. We all just looked up at the sky and we breathed out and in and we all thought the same things, but nobody said. Someone finally had to say, though, didn’t they? And that one is me.
“The wine still waits in the cellars below. My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as-yet-unburied summer.”
I hope all of you have Green Town summer memories yet unburied, and may you make more this very summer, which someone dear to you will tell and re-tell someday with a long, loving look back.
This weekend marks Hemingway’s 126th birthday, by the way, and the Hemingway Foundation has several events planned to highlight the impact his Green Town had on him. If you’re looking to reacquaint yourself, you can probably find a few of his books at Oak Park’s brand new Dandelion Bookshop, cozily tucked underneath our offices on Oak Park Avenue. Hemingway is well worth the read. Wouldn’t surprise me if they also had a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine as well.
And maybe even a copy of Our Town Oak Park, where you can read plenty about summer memories in my version of Green Town.
