I sent the poem below to Ray on the ocasion of his 82nd birthday, I received a lovely reply letter and have both the letter and the peom framed on my library wall, just to remind me of how his words have touched my life. I share it with you, that someone else with better talent may do the same on his next birthday.
(The format is not preserved - it should be read in center justified format.) A Birthday Poem for Ray

This day I wish to send a greeting to a friend of mine,
We have been friends for such a long, long time,
And though each the other only briefly met,
We as friends can share tears of joy from words yet
Read, or re-read and cherished anew,
And with each reading, our friendship grew.

Born of small town sounds and sights and fears,
With dark ravine echoes to savor later in years,
Of strange creatures made real by imagining,
Captured in words to share with others dreaming,
Who then heard and saw and knew his boyhood fright,
And learned to love the dark, as he Switched on the Night.

I cried with the Dwarf in the mirror maze,
As he tried to see himself larger through gaze
At a magic screen of glass and shape,
Only to be tricked and then to gape,
At a smaller man he could not be,
And the laughing lady went on laughing, alone by the sea.

I felt the lonesome call of fog horn on pier,
As child I fished and it bellowed when fog came near,
And knew first hand why a great beast would come as if called by mate,
To circle in sea so cold and dark and stay and wait,
To hear a sound from eons ago made by man to warn ships that past,
And believe that another has answered its call with - Beee Ooooh � at last.

I have laughed as Junior made his annual rising,
Summoned his lady friends, then had an unsizing,
Cooger and Dark taught lessons that in a circus of delight,
Can also be Something Wicked that comes in the night,
And the loves and fears of humankind are not felt only here,
But Martians can love and look at humans with fear.

My friend has spent a lifetime asking �What if�,
And says that his Muse cannot be coaxed up in a jif,
But must come from his feelings bottled as fine wine,
Fermenting �till ready to share, each in its own time.

I am glad to know my friend, Raymond Douglas Bradbury by name,
Without sharing his friendship in words my life would not have been the same,
For he is a poet who with metaphor and simile has cut a place on the shelf,
And is now very comfortable up there with the masters of literature himself,
I am sure Collier and Dickinson and Melville would boast,
That he is their friend as well, but I still love him the most.

Happy Birthday Ray


Written by Philip Trask
August 22, 2002

Good job, Philip! I enjoyed your poem and all its references to Ray's stories. I'll bet he enjoyed it, and I'm sure you treasure his letter like gold. I know I would. Aren't we lucky to have found someone so talented and inspiring? Many people go through life and never get turned on (I hate that phrase, but hopefully you know what I mean) by a book or author like that, and I feel sorry for them.

I enjoyed the poem, also. I also liked that you had references to some major works in there.

Imskipper's comment reminded me of a quote by Thoreau in the chapter, "Reading," in his book, "Walden". This chapter is a great one to read on reading and what it is about, but the following short quote is the concept that came to my mind:

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!"

I know that a new life was opened to me when I read Farenheit 451 in 9th grade. A friend made me read it, I then went on to read all of Bradbury's available works, went from there into science fiction, and from there to literature, philosophy, and theology. Reading F451 in 9th grade changed the direction of my life and I have never gone back.

As I read the postings here on this board, I think the real legacy of Bradbury is not how many books and stories he's written; it's how many hearts and minds he has turned on through his use of language, his imagination and creativity, and his phenomenal story-telling skills.

Phillip:

You captured the spirit of Bradbury.
What a wonderful compliment and gift....

Philip, your birthday poem tribute to Ray was terrific.

I had the opportunity to tell Ray at a tribute to him in Long Beach, California last October what he and his work meant to me. I'll try to repeat it here.

Almost 40 years ago, a wise school librarian handed a bored 12-year-old boy (me) a copy of a book and said, "I think you'll like this." I took the book home, sat under a tree in my parents' back yard, and began to read. That book was "The Golden Apples of the Sun." I don't know what Isaac Newton felt like when that apple fell off the tree and conked him on the head, but it was probably similar to what I felt that day. Spaceships, dinosaurs, baseball, time travel...all the things I loved, told in a magical way I had never read before. I was hooked. I immediately sought out and read all of Ray's books, and have been a Ray Bradbury reader and fan ever since.

I heard Ray speak a few years ago at a public library. During his talk, he urged that everyone wake up each day "hyperventilating" with enthusiam about something in their lives, which struck me as a wise and wonderful way to live. Well, it's Ray's writing that has always made me hyperventilate, and for that I (along with several million other fans) can only say, "Thank you!"

Maybe Dandelion ...
...can download all the letters and greetings and poems any of us write...on this forum...and send them all one bunch to Ray, by his birthday. About two weeks away. What say, Dandelion?

This is my plan, IF I can get my printer properly up and running!

Bonne Idee.

Ray, dude, keep on writing.
Cheers, Translator
---
that's about all I could tell him.

Cheers, Translator

Now that I DO have a good working printer, this was one of the threads I was going to pass on to Mr. Bradbury and a perfect place for a passage I just ran across while reading "Of Time and the River," by Thomas Wolfe:

' As he stood there, tranced in that powerful spell of silence and of night, he heard swift footsteps running down the station stairs, he turned and saw Joel Pierce approaching. He ran forward quickly, his tall, thin figure clad in a blue coat and white flannels, alive with the swift boyish eagerness that was one of his engaging qualities.

"Gosh!" he said, in his eager whispered tone, panting a little as he came up, "--I'm sorry that I'm late: we have people staying at
the house; I had to drive a woman who's been staying with us to Poughkeepsie--I tried to get you there, but your train had already gone. I drove like hell getting here.--It's good to see you!" he burst out in his eager whispering way--at once so gentle, and so friendly and spontaneous--"It's SWELL that you could come!" he whispered enthusiastically. "Come on! They're all waiting for you!"

And picking up his friend's valise, he walked swiftly across the platform and began to climb the stairs.

Although Joel Pierce would have spoken in this way to any friend--to anyone for whom he had a friendly feeling, however casual--and
although the other youth knew that he would have spoken this way to many other people--the words filled him with happiness, with an instinctive warmth and affection for the person who had spoken them. Indeed, the very fact that there was in Joel's words--in all his human relationships--this curious impersonality, gave what he said an enhanced value. For in this way Joel revealed instinctively what everyone who knew him well felt about him--an enormous decency and radiance in his soul and character, a wonderfully generous and instinctive friendliness towards humanity--that became finer and more beautiful because of its very impersonality.

This warm, instinctive humanity was evident in all he did, it came out somehow in the most casual words and relationships with people. '

Now, except for the bit about driving a car, does this not greatly remind you of someone we all know and love and his own special way of relating to almost everyone, and certainly to kindred spirits?

Most excellent, Dandelion!

Here's another passage from "Of Time and the River" which I find the truest description I've ever read of not only the nature of the artist but the relationship between the artist and the appreciators of art:

'He sensed quickly that his fears were groundless. No man ever had a more generous, enthusiastic and devoted following than he had
that morning in the presence of these two fine young people--Joel Pierce and his sister Rosalind.

He saw--or rather FELT at once--their rapt and fascinated attentiveness. Joel sat, his gaunt figure hinged forward on his knees, in an attitude of tense, motionless and utterly silent interest: from time to time as the young dramatist glanced up from his great sheaf of written manuscript he could see Joel's lean
gaunt face fixed on him, uplifted, with its strangely pure and radiant eagerness, and Rosalind, her warm and strong young hands
clasped quietly, folded in her lap, her warm and lovely face flushed with excitement, her eyes luminous, vague and tender, as if she were really in a theatre seeing the figures in the play pass before her invested in all the magic that the stage could give to them, displayed an interest that was more relaxed and more abstracted than her brother's, but none the less absorbed.

The sense and sight and assurance of these things acted like a powerful and gloriously intoxicating liquor on his heart and mind
and spirit. He felt an overpowering surge of warm affection, proud and tender gratefulness towards Joel and his sister. It seemed to him that they were the finest people he had ever known--the most generous, the truest, highest, and the loyalest--and the knowledge that they liked his play--were in fact conquered and possessed, brought out of themselves and laid under the play's power and magic--his OWN power and magic--overwhelmed him for a moment with a
feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that life can yield--the happiness that is at once the most selfish and
the most selfless--the happiness of the artist when he sees that his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour, glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon their lives the spell of its enchantment. At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images
that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity. This is the
reason that the artist lives and works and has his being: that from life's clay and his own nature, and from his father's common earth
of toil and sweat and violence and error and bitter anguish, he may distil the beauty of an everlasting form, enslave and conquer man by his enchantment, cast his spell across the generations, beat death down upon his knees, kill death utterly, and fix eternity with the grappling-hooks of his own art. His life is soul-hydroptic with a quenchless thirst for glory, and his spirit tortured by the anguish of possession--the intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man's living, a single moment of life's beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping for ever through our fingers with time's sanded drop, flowing for ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can be held. This is the artist, then--life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave--and to do these things, to get the reward for which he thirsts, with his own immortality to beat and conquer life, enslave mankind, utterly to possess and
capture beauty he will do anything, use anything, destroy anything--be ruthless, murderous and destructive, cold and cruel and
merciless as hell to get the thing he wants, achieve the thing he values and must do or die.

He is at once life's monstrous outcast and life's beauty-drunken lover, man's bloody, ruthless, pitiless and utterly relentless enemy, and the best friend that mankind ever had: a creature compact of the most selfish, base, ignoble, vicious, cruel and unrighteous passions that man's life can fathom or the world contain, and a creature whose life with all its toil and sweat and bitter anguish is the highest, grandest, noblest, and the most
unselfish, the most superbly happy, good and fortunate life that men can know, or any man attain. He is the tongue of his unuttered
brothers, he is the language of man's buried heart, he is man's music and life's great discoverer, the eye that sees, the key that
can unlock, the tongue that will express the buried treasure in the hearts of men, that all men know and that no man has a language for--and at the end he is his father's son, shaped from his father's earth of blood and sweat and toil and bitter agony: he is at once, therefore, the parent and the son of life, and in him life and all man's nature are compact; he is most like man in his very differences, he is what all men are and what not one man in a
million ever is; and he has all, knows all, sees all that any man on earth can see and hear and know.

This knowledge came to him that morning as he read the play that he had written to his two friends: as he went on with his reading, and
felt with a proud triumphant joy and happiness the sense of their devotion, his voice grew strong and confident, the scenes and words and people of the play began to flame and pulse and live with his own passion--the whole play moved across his vision in flaming images of beauty, truth and loveliness, his spirit rose on the
powerful wings of a jubilant conviction, a tremendous happiness, his heart beat like a hammer-stroke and seemed to ring against his
ribs with every blow the music of this certitude.

It took him about two hours to read the play: when he finished he felt a sense of triumphant finality, an immense and joyful peace within him, and he waited for them to speak.'

Is that not the most perfect description of the artist, and a most perfect tribute to Ray, that could ever be offered? Has he not written scenes of the most shocking violence and devastating destruction, presented so beautifully and creatively as to form warning and evoke inspiration? And does he not truly appreciate his audience and reveal that appreciation in the most gracious and charming manner? He stands a prince among artists and all humanity!