My Aching Headline

Spell check fails to save New Years Eve party goers from baboon drop.

The Passing Of A Giant

A giant left our world today.  Others more talented than myself will be better able to eulogize him.  But I wanted to pay tribute in my own small way.

  Ray Bradbury is best known for his novels, and in particular, science fiction.   However, I find myself most entertained, most enthralled, by his short stories.  And I think his most compelling work, the stories that reach inside of your heart to the place that tears and smiles are born, are the ones that have no scientific bent to them at all. What follows are excerpts from two of my favorites.  I would encourage you strongly to seek out and read these, and his other stories, in their entirety.

"The first light on the roof outside; very early morning.  The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer.  And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines.  Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it, and pipings of gold; and its chrome bell rings if the ancient motorman taps it with a wrinkled shoe.  The numerals on the trolley's front and sides are a bright as lemons.  Within, its seats prickle with cool green moss.  Something like a buggy whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing trees from which it takes its juice.  From every window blows an incense, the all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning."

The Trolley

"The grapes tasted of fresh, clear water and something that they had saved from the morning dews and the evening rains. They were the warmed-over flesh of April ready now, in August, to pass on their simple gain to any passing stranger.  And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full."

Hopscotch


"The Trolley" was originally published in GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, copyright 1955 by the Hearst Corporation.  It also appears in the book A Medicine For Melancholy And Other Stories


"Hopscotch" copyright 1996 by Ray Bradbury.  It appears in the book Quicker Than The Eye.