The Bradbury Chronicles Read Free

sunbaked streets of Los Angeles. Halloween was always Ray’s favorite holiday, an appreciation he had developed as a child from his beloved aunt Neva—his greatest creative mentor. Even as an octogenarian, Ray still reveled in the ritual of All Hallows’ Eve.
    There were many other special occasions. We made annual summer pilgrimages to the San Diego comic book convention. During our first trip in 2001, Ray found and bought a comic book adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past for Maggie, knowing that she would roll her eyes and curse under her breath that her beloved Proust had been adapted into that most lowly of narrative forms—the comic strip. We brought it home and she had a good laugh.
    From my initial meeting with Ray Bradbury in 2000, I have spent countless privileged days with this American icon, discovering the personal, human side to a man who has been a household name for decades in well-read households around the world. I discovered a few random Ray Bradbury personality traits that illuminate the very private side to the very public man.
    He has an insatiable appetite for sweets; Clark Bars are his favorite. At restaurants, for dessert, he always orders vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, even if it is not on the menu. One day while dining in a Paris café with Maggie, Ray ordered his usual. The waiter dutifully agreed to deliver the dessert, only to find he had none of the ingredients on hand. Panic-stricken, the waiter sent a restaurant staffer into the center of Paris to a renowned ice creamery. An inordinate amount of time lapsed, and, just as the Bradburys were ready to give up and leave, the dessert arrived, having traveled halfway across Paris, down cobblestoned backstreets and heavily trafficked thoroughfares.
    Other interesting asides: Ray Bradbury has never driven a car, yet there is a chocolate brown 1971 Jaguar sitting in his garage; Maggie was the family driver. Ray resists taking medicine. When he has a headache, he favors self-hypnosis. He does not read other science fiction and fantasy writers. “I don’t want to inadvertently steal from them,” he states. As for religion, he does not believe in anthropomorphizing God. “It’s too limiting,” he says. “This universe is all such a great mystery. We just don’t know how it was created.” But he does have his own theory. “It’s always been here. Why not? That’s just as plausible as the big bang.”
    Though Maggie whispered on the side one day that his favorite book is Dandelion Wine, he claims not to have a favorite book from among his own work. “They are all my children,” he proclaims. “You can’t pick favorites when it comes to children.”
    Ray has a boisterous sense of humor—something that comes as a surprise to those who expect the author of Fahrenheit 451 to be a brooding, dark, and paranoid visionary. Late one night, arriving home at two A.M ., we got out of his limousine and Ray was, as usual, telling a story, all arms and hands and booming voice. He was laughing as he talked. Across the street, a neighbor’s window cranked open and a dark figure peered out, yelling into the night, “Shut up!” Imagine, telling Ray Bradbury to shut up. Ray laughed and we went upstairs, noisy and clamorous as ever.
    He doesn’t much like profanity. He was raised in a household and a time when bars of soap were regularly inserted into foul mouths for sinful utterances. But as the years went on, he grew more comfortable with the occasional curse employed for dramatic effect. Even then, he only cursed in rare instances, such as the time he was lecturing at a local university and a literature class tried to tell him what Fahrenheit 451 was really about. They were wrong and he told them so. But they insisted that they were right. “No, you’re wrong,” he said. It went back and forth like this for some time, a