A vivid childhood Christmas memory

To all my readers, if you celebrate Christmas I hope you have a merry Christmas! If you don’t, have a wonderful December 25th. To celebrate Christmas, I thought I would tell the story of my most vivid childhood memory. While we had a few Christmas traditions in my home and I have many memories of family time, opening presents, watching Christmas specials, but one of my most vivid memories is going to candlelight service.

You see, when I was a child, my family often spent Christmas Eve and Christmas mornings opening presents at my maternal grandparent’s house then went to my paternal Grandparents home for a large Italian Family Christmas dinner.

Candlelight service was special to me, perhaps even magical. Say church and people always think it’s about God, but for me, it wasn’t. I don’t remember any of the sermons. What I loved was holding the candle. My parents didn’t allow me to play with matches. I wasn’t normally aloud to hold a lit candle, but for one evening of the year, I had to take the flame from the candle of whoever sat beside me on the pew and then give the light to the next person. It made me nervous, I knew fire was dangerous, but there I was, holding a white candle with a white paper bobeche to catch the drips of wax. For a short time, I was in control. I was responsible for it. I had to make sure I did not drop it or let it get to close to my little sisters or the hymnals. In fact, since the pews were also wood, I thought I had to keep it safe from the pews too.  The magic happened, because for that short period of time, I was a grown up.

So that is my most vivid Christmas memory. What’s yours?

Memories of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury died on Tuesday. I neither feel sadness nor shock, he was 91 after all. Yet another tiny bit of my childhood has gone. See, when I was young, he was my friend and one of my mentors. Of course, he didn’t know that. We never met.

Imagine if you will, me as a young girl, probably about age 10, though I cannot say for sure, maybe I’m 11. I am about to leave the Children’s fiction area in the Sylvan Public Library and wander into the land of Adult Fiction. My mom is with my sisters looking at kids books and toys, but I am much too old for that now. I don’t remember if my brother is there, but he would have been 14 or 15 at the time, so he didn’t always come anymore.

I had (and still have) brown hair. I am sure  that I am ugly, since I don’t know within a few years, boys will start showing interest. I’m not a unpopular kid who gets picked on too much, but not popular either. My grades are  good, but I’m not spectacularly good in anything. I come from a fairly large extended family, and though I am well-loved, I often consider myself an outsider. I think I want to be a writer, but everyone always makes jokes about it.

The Sylvan Library is one of the bigger libraries in the Kitsap County System. (Though small compared to the massive libraries of Seattle which I am now used to.)  There was still an old-fashions card catalogue, but I tended to use the double row of biege computers and had tiny golf pencils and slips of paper beside them.  Plastic and metal chairs surround tables and the independent reading stations which are made out of mdf covered with an oak veneer. The short rough brown carpeting.

One of the first authors who I discovered was Ray Bradury. I think I recognized the name, maybe my brother mentioned it, I don’t know why out of the many books there, my finger stopped on his.

I do remember while checking out, being asked by the librarian, “Who told you what to look for?”

My response was something to the effect: “Nobody, I just picked these books up. They are cool.”

I think she agreed with me, but maybe she was just happy to see us three girls (and maybe our brother) with a mom who cared enough to bring her kids to the library every few weeks in the summer.

I wish I had the vocabulary back then to explain that I had sat down on the floor and already scanned a few stories. And within a few thousand words, I cared about the characters and their situations which Bradbury portrayed. He wrote things that were terrifying and exciting. Technology was always part of the work, but it was never at the expense of the characters. But ultimately he could burn an image into my mind with prose.

And 25 years later, I can still remember the images.

The first time I read There Will Come Soft Rains. I remember seeing a vision of the outline on the house of the dead family–especially the little boy and girl playing with the ball. I put myself in the place of the little girl and imagined it was my ashes that stained the wall with my brother and sisters. The image remains in my mind to this day. I kept hoping the story wouldn’t end the way it did. That the kids would miraculously reappear, that no one was dead, but they were. In a story published 26 years prior to my birth, I saw death. And the fear of what a nuclear war might really look like. In this way, war became something more than the bunch of dates they kept trying to get us to remember at school.

I remember crying for Margot in All Summer in a Day.  Maybe its growing up in the Pacific Northwest and having days upon days of rain, I wept because I felt like I had locked her up and made her miss the sunshine.

I could go on, but the point is that Ray Bradbury, while truly a master at writing short fiction, was more than that to me. Along with many other writers who did not write for children, he  was a friend of my childhood. He inspired me to stretch my imagination and not fear writing about the dark sides of just about anything and everything. After all, he wrote dystopic science fiction long before it was popular.