i walk into this old used book store. they have somehow crammed 2 million books into a little strip mall joint, it buts up to a mexican restaurant and you are smelling spices over the wall next to the mythology and the comic books.

the rest of the store smells like a carpet cleaner, if you buy a book there the carpet cleaner smell stays on it for months, years. you open it up and you remember, ah yes, i must have bought this book there.

i find something by ray bradbury. we read farenheit 451 in school, but nothing else. i crack it open while i put my feet on the pavement, the sun pouring down.

by the time i get where i'm going, i have been to another world. i have been in a power house in the desert. i have been on an ancient canal on mars. i have been worried about the feelings of characters that don't exist, that i'll never meet.

do i have a favorite story? no. i have memories of reading, i have feelings. i have a tattered paperback from the 1970s that fits in my back pocket.

most of all i have these secrets, secret stories, about what people really think and feel, in our age of modernization.

Awesome Turmeric. It's neat how Bradbury's stories are meaningful to each of us and that we can share that with others. I haven't found another author that has impacted me the same way. I need to find a good used book store near me and check out the Bradbury section.

Thank you for this post turmeric. I remember that as a teenager I would wander from second-hand bookstore to second-hand bookstore, looking through the Ray Bradbury section for anything new. Any time that I went on holiday with my parents, the first thing I did on visiting a new town was to look for Bradbury books in the nearest bookstore! I remember one time very well: when I and my family went to Glastonbury town, my father took a walk up the steep hill to photograph the tor and I walked around the shops. There was an enormous bookshop there, gone now, that had nearly ten Bradbury books which I bought all at once. I spent the rest of the holiday with my head stuck in these books! Especially 'The Day It Rained Forever', I won't forget reading that for the first time. It was a collection that I hadn't even heard of, but I read it all in one afternoon... walking along along a Picasso beach and shooting to the stars.