BACKYARDS STRETCHING INTO DARK: THREE OLD BOYS ON GROWING UP IN THE MIDWEST

In memory of Tom Ormesher, who loved Autumn, and, every October, became for all of us, "Mr. Moundshroud."1

I. Someone has described Ray Bradbury as “having one foot on Mars and the other on his grandparents' shady front porch in Illinois”—a wonderfully apt picture of this imaginative and humane man, who died last year. His Mars (The Martian Chronicles)has something of the homey porch, and his novels of midwestern boyhood (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree) are always dreamily adrift in the fantastic. 2

Bradbury's poem, Byzantium I Come Not From is both dreamy and rooted. It is like a psalmic prelude to the charmed stories of childhood noted above. (It is, in fact, part of the preface to Dandelion Wine.) The poem can be read in its own light, but it may be instructive to note that it is written with both homage and ironic reference to Yeat’s poems, The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Sailing to Byzantium.

“Byzantium I Come Not From"   (Ray Bradbury)

Byzantium, I come not from,

But from another time and place

Whose race was simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois.

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan, there I came from

And not, good friends, Byzantium.

And yet in looking back I see

From topmost part of farthest tree

A land as bright, beloved and blue

As any Yeats found to be true.

The house I lived in, hewn of gold

And on the highest market sold

Was dandelion-minted, made

By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.

And then of course our finest wine

Came forth from that same dandelion,

While dandelion was my hair

As bright as all the summer air;

I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes

And cherries stained my lips, my cries,

My shouts of purest exaltation:

Byzantium? No. That Indian nation

Which made of Indian girls and boys

Spelled forth itself as Illinois.

Yet all the Indian bees did hum:

Byzantium.

Byzantium.

So we grew up with mythic dead

To spoon upon midwestern bread

And spread old gods' bright marmalade

To slake in peanut-butter shade,

Pretending there beneath our sky

That it was Aphrodite's thigh...

While by the porch-rail calm and bold

His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold

My grandfather, a myth indeed,

Did all of Plato supersede

While Grandmama in rockingchair

Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care

Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright

To winter us on summer night.

And uncles, gathered with their smokes

Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,

And aunts as wise as Delphic maids

Dispensed prophetic lemonades

To boys knelt there as acolytes

To Grecian porch on summer nights;

Then went to bed, there to repent

The evils of the innocent;

The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears

Said, through the nights and through the years

Not Illinois nor Waukegan

But blither sky and blither sun.

Though mediocre all our Fates

And Mayor not as bright as Yeats

Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?

Byzantium.

Byzantium.

II. John Stewart (not to be confused with the comedian, Jon Stewart), who died in 2008 at age 68, was as much a folk artist as Grandma Moses (though slightly hipper). He painted with his guitar and his heart, his pictures tinged with both the golden sunlight of a California boyhood and the earthier tones of the midwest. His folk-rock style influenced many whose names are known better than his own, and his songs were steeped in an “Americana” that evoked a love of country through images of waving wheat rather than waving flags. His Bradbury-like reminiscence in “Pirates of Stone County Road” (which he described as being set "in Nebraska or Kansas or Oklahoma") makes us see a particular scene that also manages to depict a sort of universal childhood.

“The Pirates of Stone County Road” (a song)

~John Stewart

Henry! It's getting t'wards suppertime you know.

Henry?…

There she calls from her second floor room,

the end of a back porch afternoon,

where we'd stand on the bow of our own man-of-war,

no longer the back porch any more.

And we'd sail, pulling for China,

the pirates of Stone County Road

all weathered and blown.

And we'd sail ever in glory—

'till hungry and tired,

the pirates of Stone County Road

were turning for home.

Henry! You better be getting on up to bed now, don't ya know…

Henry?...

There she calls from her high wicker chair,

as I climb to my room up the stair,

where the wind through the shutters

sends the mainsail to fall

from the shadow of the bedpost on the wall.

And we'd sail, pulling for China,

the pirates of Stone County Road

weathered and blown.

And we'd sail ever in glory,

'till hungry and tired,

the pirates of Stone County Road

were turning for home.

Henry! Can you hear me, Henry

 Are you up there Henry? Henry?... 3

III. I’m no poet, but occasionally the muse gives me a nudge anyway, and I try my hand. My muse in this early attempt was obviously Ray Bradbury.

"943 Colorado Southwest"

The big white house that once held me

I now hold in memory.

It had no ghosts then,

though fifty years old--

sixty years ago.

We are the ghosts now,

wandering through rooms of light

Slamming doors to meet in front

for games of autumn nights.

Spirea-lined and lilac-hedged,

front steps were base, but

back yard stretching into dark

was the place to hide,

to crouch—unbreathing—

Till the seeker passed,

Then to breathe again!

And leap, and run….

I’d hide forever now,                             

till sounds the "all-in-free!"

And mother, apron aflutter

at the front-door confluence

of darkness and light,

calls me in,
then up
the tall staircase,

to that high bedroom,

to sleep,

a ghost, exhausted.
________________________________________________________________
1. "Mr. Moundshroud" is the spirit of Halloween in Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree." Tom put on a fantastic Halloween party every October.

2. It's October! Find a copy of Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree" and read it with a child 6-12 years old.

3. Here is a Youtube audio of John Stewart singing "The Pirates of Stone County Road." (I think the producer's slide show gets in the way, but it's all I could find. I suggest you turn around and just let the words paint the picture.)

4. Thanks to my friend Warren Hanson for the sketch of my boyhood home.

THE LORD OF THE PLASTIC REVOLVING BOOK RACK

My local grocery store has a paperback book rack that I’d never really noticed before. This time I noticed it and brushed by, supercilious nose in the air. What literary nourishment could I possibly find at Nelsons County Market? But then I had a flashback – to a time when I did, indeed, find a number of interesting books displayed in just this kind of rack.

When I was a senior in high school, I did not disdain such displays. Miss Zamow, my A.P. English teacher, had ignited an interest in reading, and whenever I was in the drug store in Baken Park (Rapid City’s first strip mall – this was 1964, it had to have been one of the first strip malls in the country), I’d spend long minutes twirling the plastic tower of books, hoping to find something as engaging as “Return of the Native” – our most recent A.P. assignment.  (Although I’ve tried in vain to convince my daughters that I was not, in fact, a nerd in high school, they’ve, alas, seen the class photos. I’m afraid I’ll have to admit that the best way to picture this scene is to imagine that kid from Napoleon Dynamite listlessly watching the books whirl by on the rotating rack.) Anyway, it is at that very rack that I discovered Solzenhitsyn’s “One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Who knew! A world classic at Rexall.

Later, a spin of the same carousel brought forth “The Lord of the Flies,” then (speaking of spinning carousels), Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” (No one evokes a midwestern boys' world like Ray Bradbury.)

After my first year of college I had a job in a small town in far northeastern South Dakota. In another drug store at another plastic rack I picked up a book called “The Lord of the Rings” because the title reminded me of that other “Lord” book that I had recently read. I took it back to my room, opened it, and didn't close it until I got to the end, saw with panic that it "continued in Book Two," jumped into my car, and zoomed almost frantically among the other small towns of that quadrant of South Dakota until, on another rack in some other corner pharmacy, I finally came upon “The Two Towers.” (A week later the cover headline on Time Magazine was “Lord of the Rings Sweeps the Nation’s Campuses.” Thus, I’ve always taken credit for being the American discoverer of J.R.R. Tolkien.)

A few years later, visiting my wife’s farm home, we drove into town on some errands. Another small town, yet another Rexall Drug Store. This time it was the fat paperback edition of “Lonesome Dove.” I had never heard of it or Larry McMurtry – so once again a good read was accompanied by the joy of discovery.

I could go on. Actually, I couldn’t. From that time on I graduated to the world of funky neighborhood book shops, Barnes and Noble, and, now, Amazon – leaving the paperback racks circling backward into the past.  But I wonder? Have I been missing something? Just when I’ve discovered Whole Foods, the Atlantic food editor is recommending the produce and groceries of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart! Should I, in fact, be looking among the paperbound spy thrillers and bodice-rippers next to the film department at Walgreens to find (or even discover!) the next great contribution to world lit?

It would be a good ending for this essay if I could report that I went back to that grocery store book display and found “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” or “The Sonnets of John Donne: A New Interpretation.” But I didn’t. I didn’t go back, that is. But next time I walk by, I’m going to pause … and look… hopefully….