Ray Bradbury-thoughts on his death

How odd that the very night Ray Bradbury had died I found myself in a discussion about him, only to discover his demise the next day.  Somehow I feel as though I've lost a relative, an old friend I'd lost touch with but still loved dearly.  His writing was always about people, which is why he's one of a very few science fiction/fantasy authors that I love.  So many get wrapped up in describing the world or the gadgets or the plot that comes out of the crazy world, but Ray Bradbury never forgot that people are people whether here or on Mars, whether adults or children.  And he was excellent at imagining what they might do in what many found, unimaginable situations.

I haven't read as many of his works as you would think, considering I'm such a fan.  I have read Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine a few times each.  I've read the Illustrated Man, Farewell Summer and most of Green Shadows, White Whale.  I started the Martian Chronicles this week.  

Dandelion Wine feels like it could have been about my own small hometown and in the era of my parents childhood.  Ray is only 12 years older than my father.  He must've been about the age of Becky Walton who grew up next door to my mother (yup she grew up next to a family of Waltons--so did I).  So hearing of his own childhood sounded so familiar because it was very similar to the lives of my parents growing up in the neighboring state (although they were on the southern end of Indiana and he on the northern end of Illinois).  So I feel as though I've lost my Uncle Eli all over again.  Uncle Eli was the one that had a handful of stories that were well-polished and well-loved; every family seems to have one.  I feel as though I've lost all over again the small town itself.  English Indiana was prone to flooding so the old sandstone library, the old barber shop, the old marble bank and the old post office and the old Denbo funeral home where I'd attended more funerals than I can keep track of,  were all torn down when the town literally moved away (only about 2 miles though).   The new town is fairly devoid of personality, but when John and I moved back in the spring of 1999 I brought the librarian to tears when I signed my full name, which included my mother's maiden name and my own.  The librarian remembered both my grandmothers.  People would stop my sisters in the grocery store and say, "You must be Opal's girl".  When they did the plant exchange at the Home Ec Club the retired librarian (who had given my very first library card) brought a cactus runner that was from a plant that she'd originally gotten from my grandfather who by this time had been dead almost 20 years.  When John and I were on our honeymoon my dad took us on a cemetery tour of the county and told us how we were related to what seemed like, everyone in the county.  We're also related to everyone in the county to north of us, but we thought we'd save that tour for another day.  I guess what I'm saying is my sisters and I are from a place where our roots run deep.  A world where people were people and they were the focus of our lives, and a world that felt as though Ray Bradbury were a member of the family.  Ray is even the most common name in my family.  A lost world that Ray Bradbury did an excellent job of capturing so it wasn't really lost after all.  He was brilliant, and always so hopeful about the world, which considering the seriousness of so much of his writing and all the social ills they addressed, he was always hopeful that those people would wake up and remember they were people and start making the world a better place and jump off the bandwagon of self-destruction so many seem to be on.

Here are a couple links:
Ray Bradbury's website
NPR All Things Considered
NPR Fresh Air Interview November 2000
NPR Talk of the Nation
NPR news break, includes audio of him talking about writing Farhenheit 451.
NPR snippets