When you visit, what's it like for you here, now? How do you feel?

The new interstate's been built, yet here's this place on the gravel road, October blue-sky, Indian Summer afternoon, walkin,' boot-kickin.'

Listen--in the rushes of the autumn grass, a thousand stories whisper.
---
This is a special place to me. Soon, it may be gone and I will miss it terribly. But until then, I'll return every now and again, maybe chase fireflies or fly a kite or watch a storm for ball-lightning, because this is a magic place, and you can do that.

So--let me listen while you tell me how this place is that way for you, too.

Nice, evocative imagery, there.
Though both boards have their problems, this one does seem a bit more personal than the new one. I think the new one will be fine once we get Dandelion back as moderator - someone who cares about the raison d'�tre of such a "meeting place" as this.
Meanwhile, I will keep checking both sites...

This is the first website I ever went to, first thing I ever chicken pecked with my pointers on my keyboard.

Yeah, means more to me than I could have ever imagined. This place, right now, means more to me than my memories of my first car, my first house, my first kiss. Because those memories, while remaining dear to me, are only dear memories because they were "firsts". Here I am able to bask in his glory, testify to his greatness, and find comarades, others who have been similarily affected. We share something in common. Is it reverence? Love? Maybe like homing pidgeons we just don't know where else to go. To me it was all too natural to type in www.raybradbury.com and I didn't even know if such a website existed. People like us sit down at a computer for the first time and are curious about this thing called the internet.....what else IS there to type in? Those other "firsts" were replaced by better cars, bigger houses, and softer kisses, but what can replace this place?

I probably didn't do this thread justice. I did the best I could, it's just hard to put all that I'm feeling right now into words.

Echoing footfalls on empty attic floorboards.

Thanks for the kind words, Braling II.

Actually, I feel a little like Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. When asked about "The Carol Burnett Show," they claimed, "We still do the show." Kinda like the guy in that one Martian story with the empty theater. One actor, no audience!

Braling II, "evocative imagery"--just trying to make the Master proud, thanks.

gs, you've more than done this thread justice. Thanks for your heartfelt response.

dandelion, is that a haiku? It's been so long, I no longer know the definition, but your words are elegant and I can hear the snap of a camera's shutter. It's good to come here and see the word "moderator" by your name, exactly where it belongs.

How ironic grasstain's words ring in view of the alternate site, a new and improved attempt at what we had been doing so well for over three years...(with Dandelion keeping the frames straight on all of the walls and sparks fanned in all of the hearths.)

Being here really feels like a Homecoming.

It was great to read that the signings and appearances went so very well for Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Weller. Congratulations to both!

Thanks again for the wonderful words! The new site was a rude shock, but with a few tweaks, I am adjusting.

I still view this as the better of the two sites. It's a bit like the new car syndrome. How fancy all the gadgets and buttons seem! And the bright new paint job--is it really that indigo bright metallic!?
Yet, I recall tooling down a country road on a warm summer afternoon in that old red Cutlass. It can never be outdone...

Oh, well! On Mr. Bradbury, I have read the first 100 pages of the new bio by Sam Weller and have been quite pleased so far. The tone and insights are excellent. It's just what so many of us here have been awaiting since the site was first fired up. My only pause, and this is not a literary criticism, is that at the present time with final exams approaching, tests being written, an article in the works, and little league coaching at night (after a day of teaching), I have only found a few late night hours for personal reading. Darn! However, that will allow for an uninterrupted re-read this summer. Great.

Recent readings of Patrick McManus, a satirist who jumps from his youthful days (in Idaho) to the present as well as RB, have brought about uncontrolled guffaws. His metaphors are hilarious and ring of those familiar better days, long ago! http://www.mcmanusbooks.com/biography/dear_bio.html

[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 06-01-2005).]

By any chance a '72 Cutlass?

Hope the new site achieves this comfortable feel, in time.

I'm about halfway through Mr. Weller's wonderful book. Savoring it. Translation: work taking most of my time. Bosses want me to learn how to write grants. Oh, bother.

But, to read about the life of my hero, through the eyes of a true fan--worth the wait.

to all:::

Is it the familiarity of the old site? Or just something about how it worked? It's comfortable. There seems to be an awful lot of lags in the new one. (is it because I have a slow computer 300 mgz)? Maybe it's the feel that I have too many hoops to run through. Here, you just sat down and typed.

Ah...or do I hear the creaking of old man age setting his unwelcomed strokes against the old wine skin not ready for that new wine of the Bradbury site?

Patrick McManus also wrote a wonderful "sneakers" story. Would like to see it collected side by side with RB's sometime.

Like visiting my old house. As a kid, when I first moved to a new town, I dreamed about my old house all the time. I still enjoy visiting the town, but the nostalgia has decreased over the years. I can see so many better things now about my new house that it took me a long time to see at first.

Quite recently had to sell the family home and land. Dad passed away now just a year this month. Mom more comfortable and safer in a friendly apartment complex with friends from years gone by, along with socializing opportunities that living alone in a big house does not allow.

Four generations of relatives and memories concluded. Living an hour away, work and a family growing, locations and time the final factors in a most difficult decision.

The town has changed, and I am no longer that 12 year old boy hiding with his large collie in the back acreage amongst the pumpkins. With pine trees and a landscape where flowers always seemed to grow on their own, bursts of green, yellow, orange, white, and red were a day to day surprise. Dad was in tune with the earth and could raise a crop of anything, anywhere, at anytime! Mom cooked everything magnificiently, and friends would appear just in time to wash their hands and join in the hours of meals and talks around the table.

But, after the final "t" was crossed and duplicates made of the duplicates, I breathed a sigh and felt the weight lifted from my shoulders, hoping I had offered my best for the home and its past in which we all had shared.

A month since, for the first time I passed the house, now a home to others. I found the grass not as well kept as my father always saw fit, the flowers not as lively somehow, and the garden which forever produced asparagas to zucchini, a mere backlawn, and it in need of a trim.

The coup de grace? The drive way, where so many games of catch and snowballs fights took place, seemed not to recognize me at all as I drew near as usual. And so I drove by without so much as slowing down, realizing how much can happen from one summer to the next...

fjpalumbo:

Marvelous slice of something to enjoy and think about...

You made a comment most important...

"...hoping I had offered my best for the home and its past in which we all had shared..."

Why else the need to tumble onto the old ways of travel on paths and stairs....longings that secretly only tear you apart...if you have given your best for the homes and its past in which we all had shared...?

___

I have an old house next door, where I grew up, and in my madness (I call it that...it must be something like it otherwise) would stare for great lengths of time thru the windows (the house was vacant of owners)...longing to run up those kitchen steps again, or the hallways barely seen thru the edge of the window glass. Because time had stopped. Practically, physically, spiritually, cosmically...and it moved not a fraction all the while I looked thru the wndow...as it had never moved before as well. Mesmerized by the lack of movement according to the invisible clock, a great fascination of how that can be kept me in perfect place.

Everyone in the house, just out of sight, most certainly.

Summer is all right beyond the back of my head, waiting...

...and I am lost somewhere between all that time is and I cannot see the time that is except the time I see before me, thru this window glass, which is not like time at all, but a place...this place, where everything still exists, just out of sight,around the bend beyond the hallways and doorways, all there, quiet, and myself peering, standing, listening, awestruck.

My take on it? Unfinished business.

Aw, most awful, unifinished business. Unfinished business...


___



[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 06-27-2005).]