Because of Ray

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys….School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along….And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands.

And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore….

And that was when I felt it. A shortening of breath. A quick pause in my heart’s normal rhythm. A widening of the eyes. And I was hooked, sitting on the bottom bunk of my room, reading the first paragraphs of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ray Bradbury had my number forever after that.

And when I am honest with myself—when I trace the connection from my fingers to my pencil, I find, there at the tip, his name. Ray is the origin of my creation myth….

He looked at language the way a composer looks at music (I imagine, anyway, not having any real ability to draw from when it comes to composing music). He builds his sentences to ebb and flow, to run together in musical rivers, every word chosen to fill a role in the symphony of the sentence. You don’t really read his words, you sing them. I am captivated by every paragraph. Enthralled. In ecstasies. And yes, that sounds rather dramatic; but if you’ve read much of Mr. Bradbury (no, not just Fahrenheit 451), you understand, and you probably agree. Yes, I will be presumptuous and say that you agree.

And this musicality of language was about…. well, sometimes nothing. About summers and lake swims and evening walks and curio shops; and young boys’ sneakers pounding across pavements; and sunburnt men riding in the backs of station wagons, sputtering philosophies. And he wrote/sang/painted of things fantastical too: Of robots spouting the words of Orson Welles in their last moments of circuitry; of merry-go-rounds that rode you years into the future in the span of a two-minute ride; of priests and aliens finding common ground and touching holiness together; and mummies long dead, entombed below the ground, and listening, listening with wonder to the mundane sounds of the living above.

And in his words and worlds I learned that this was what writing was for—not for shouting across the pages The World According to Me. But for listening with wonder. For discovering the rhythms of life, and translating them to paper. I learned to ask things like, “What if an end-of-the-world story actually came to an end? What if it wasn’t saved by some hodge-podge team of astronauts in the last ten minute window of the world’s humanity? How would that change the whole story, if it began with no hope?”

Or, “What if I stood face to face with an alien, and found that it wasn’t so alien? That we both worried about making a living and trying to understand our parents and holding onto faith in a harsh world?”

Or, “What if I lived in a society that was rotting underneath its façade of perfection? Would I have the courage to read the books I was meant to burn? Would I ask questions? Or would I press on, head down, day after day, adding my little portion of oil to the rotting engine?”

I became a writer because I want to know the answers to these questions. But not just my answers. I write because I like to watch people and wonder about them. About how Aunt Vera would deal with the death of a childhood friend. Or how my very practical neighbor, Nancy, would cope if she met the harbinger of death on her evening jog, and he walked and talked like a young boy, and was actually cordial and winning even. Or how my son, Coren, would face a post-apocalyptic world alone, with his younger sister to look after. I wonder about the tenacity of humanity, on every level, mundane and monumental. I like to watch how we all go on the way we do, amid the cacophony around us.

One day I hope to capture that tenacity with the grace of my favorites—Bradbury and McCarthy, Gaiman and Barrie, Sanderson and Snicket and Valente—but it is a long way off yet. Until then, I hope to keep watching and writing and wondering. There is truth to be found there that enriches me, in subtle and singular ways.