My Bradbury Days, My Bradbury Month

It is June, the Bradbury month.

Most people think of October when they consider Ray Bradbury. Not I. June is the month that I discovered Ray Bradbury. School was out and it was Atlanta-hot outside where I played in the sun most of the day, running through the green forests of Decatur, the suburban town where we lived. There were creeks everywhere. Full of salamanders and leeches, turtles and snakes. The old Confederate village had long since covered the cotton fields with streets of homes, but the green land was still all around us, a patchwork of forested yards and greenways snaking along the banks of the creeks that led everywhere, from neighborhood to neighborhood, endless journeys and new sights. My days of running, chasing, pursuing all that is fun--my hours of Creme-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes.

June was the month--school gone and twelve weeks of vacation begun--when my mom had brought home a book to give to me: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. So, through Alice Kurtz Smith, that book, that author, that voice found me. Before THE OCTOBER COUNTRY grabbed my breath, I already knew who Bradbury was because of my mother, and because of the lazy days of June.

June is Bradbury for me. It is the month of my birth. June is when I married Carole Henderson. That first month of summer is when my son came into the world. June is when I first put my feet to a long backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail, only seven years after I held THE ILLUSTRATED MAN in my eight-year-old hands, thus continuing my love of the green around us, of Mother Nature.

I have always thought of this month--this 30 days of warmth and sun, of golden light, of sweating skin, of dusty ground, of green stains on my denims as I cracked up on my Stingray bike careening down hills overgrown with tall grass; it is long day's adventures following creeks, catching crawdads, skipping stones, barreling into the neighborhood drug store to see if the latest issue of Star Spangled War Stories and the War that Time Forgot is on the shelf. June--hours from morning until night spent mainly out of doors, coming home only for lunch, maybe to read a short story or a Jack Kirby comic book, and then out again, chasing friends, riding bikes, wandering the blocks to see what is what.

Bradbury Month, I tell you.

Bright and warm. Sunny and damp with threatening rain, dark clouds, playgrounds. June is romance just a few years later. Sitting by a lake, holding my soon-to-be-wife. Later still, June is cradling my tiny son in my arms, never ceasing to lift him up and hold him just so until the day he no longer wants me to carry him around and then those later June days I just watch over him, and smile, my June boy.

The month of June. The days of Bradbury. The song that speaks long after that first encounter, that chilling, disturbing, amazing, June voice. My month. Bradbury days.

Mead Road, the street of my childhood, my Bradbury neighborhood, my Illustrated Days packed with color, and life, and love.

A Decatur forest. A Greentown place.

2010. Me, and Bradbury.