Ray Bradbury passed away at the age of 91 yesterday, the 5th of June 2012. There have been and will be innumerable remembrances and obituaries written about this great man by people who knew him and his work far better than I, but I feel compelled to put down a few words of my own.
I first had the good fortune to meet Mr. Bradbury when I was thirteen years old, which was the perfect age at which to met this fantastic man. It was at the 1976 San Diego Comic-Con, and though he was constantly surrounded by devotees, fans, friends, etc., he made time to actually talk with me. Not talk to or at, but actually with.
Thirteen is a tough age for most humans, I'm sure, and it was extremely tough for me. But Mr. Bradbury, in one five minute conversation, convinced me it was a magical age.
I cannot remember much of the conversation we had, but I can remember clearly Mr. Bradbury asking me if I enjoyed reading. I told him I did, and that I had read his Something Wicked This Way Comes, and had enjoyed it immensely.*
Coincidentally, the two primary characters in that novel were thirteen.
When he asked me my age, and I told him I was thirteen, He reacted in a way quite different from what I had experienced from other Pros at the Con.
For the most part. I had been treated as, well, as an irritating fanboy by quite a few of the people I had admired, as artists and writers, that I met at that Con.
Not Mr. Bradbury though. He talked with a smile, and didn't act as if I was an imposition on his time. And he told me something I had never heard from anyone, ever. He told me to enjoy being thirteen, every single minute of it.
It may not seem like a lot to some people, but at a time when the only solace I found from the confusion caused by the onset of adolescence and fairly bad life circumstances was reading, those words carried a ton of weight coming from an author I admired.
Of course I didn't then and there proceed to live my life as if everything was suddenly rainbows and unicorns - hell, I was thirteen. The hormones were pretty much in control.
But two short years from that meeting, I was spending my summer working in a carnival. And I worked in the carnival every summer until I graduated from High School. If you haven't read Something Wicked This Way Comes, that probably means nothing to you. But I digress (Surprise, surprise). Meeting Ray Bradbury that once, and on one other occassion, made my world a lot brighter, bolder. I can remember his mannerisms and the ease with which he talked to me - a pimply-faced fanboy - more than I can remember anything he actually said other than to enjoy being a teenager. He was genuinely nice, and very much seemed to enjoy being at the Con.
As an adult I have read many more of Mr. Bradbury's works. I am now far more capable of appreciating his imagination, his use of allegory and symbolism in his narrative, and his almost lyrical prose.
I read his short story, Well, What Do You Have To Say For Yourself, when the short-story collection One More For The Road, was released in 2003. Once again I found that Mr. Bradbury was writing insights I needed to read.
"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
- Ray Bradbury
*For the sake of historical accuracy, I did not say "Immensely" when I was 13. In all likelihood, I said "A lot."
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