“Every year, Said grandfather, every year, they run amuck. I let them, pride of the lion in the yard. Stare and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees. Yes. but for us, a noble thing. The dandelion.”
Do you hear some sounds which are emanating from nowhere around, and still you hear them? Or, do you not hear the sounds which are there, far away, you know this, yet you do not hear them? I advise you, to borrow the ear of a canine, for five seconds, don’t look into the eyes of that earless canine in those five seconds. When it is on you, tune it high (the ear), stretch it taut and you will hear, through this borrowed ear, those sounds, miles and miles across the town. Give it back (the ear).
Ray Bradbury does this so many times. This was his style for me. He will make you hear those sounds which are not there. Or, which are there but you are not aware! He made me feel this.
I read this book by Ray five months ago and this was my first book by the author. I liked the book and the writing very much, It impressed me a lot. Awe-inspiring! Unique in taste and style both! But I did not post my thoughts on it. Do you know the reason? I tell you now. Actually, I could not add up the entire book together at that time. There was a story going on and it was arousing the curiosity, and pressing the nerve of infantile fancy, and was moving at a very fast pace, but yet I could not gather it up. As if I had filled some sort of fresh sand in my fist, and I felt its warmth in my palms and its granularity between my fingers, yet I could not clench my fist and it slipped out slowly.
Now in the past few weeks, I have read dozens of short stories from his book ‘100 most celebrated stories’ and I got the answer to what dilemma had caught me when I finished the dandelion wine. I found that some of the stories were the same as those I had read in this book. So was the Dandelion wine a short story collection? I asked myself, and I could not say, yes! There were so many interlinked narratives in this book that you can get confused if they are all different or just one story.
Maybe my ignorance but the common thread was a 12-year-old boy Douglas. He sometimes thinks and talks a way more maturely than his age and a philosophizing tone is always present in the book. He was a mystery throughout for me. This guy Douglas!
Children squinting their ways through the hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, in summer evenings, eating foil-wrapped chilled Eskimo pies. One man trying to make a Happiness Machine, two old women collapsing against the attic door, scrabbling to lock it right, a young reporter falling in love with a ninety-year-old lady, you find all this here, in the Green town, many strange people entering in the life of Douglas one summer.
“I don’t know anything.
…The beginning of wisdom as they say. When you are seventeen, you know everything.”
Great author! Great writing! Great stories! Great this wine, Dandelion wine! Taste it once!
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