whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside. By that time, I was generally brimming with tears, anyway. Even that young I was beginning to perceive the endings of things. Things, like this lovely paper light, went away. That same year, my Grandpa was to go away for good. I think it is incredible that I remember him so well; the two of us on the lawn in front of the porch with twenty relatives for audience, and the paper tissue held between us for a final moment, filled now with warm exaltations, ready to go. But I could not let it go. It was so lovely, with the light and shadows dancing inside. And only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a nod of his head, gently, did I at last let the balloon drift free and go away up past the porch, illumining the faces of my dear family, off up above the apple trees over the beginning to sleep town and away across the night country among the stars. We stood watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it any more, and by that time tears would really be streaming down my face and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last clear his throat, and shuffle his feet, and the relatives would begin to go in the house or around on the lawn to their other houses, leaving me to smell the firecrackers on my hands and brush the tears away with sulphured fingers.
Â
The story of Grandpa Bradbury and the fire balloon, like all great Ray Bradbury stories, is a metaphorâa metaphor for letting goâand it is a recollection that Ray was quite fond of telling. He further examined his last Fourth of July with his grandfather in his essay âJust This Side of Byzantium,â which became the introduction to later editions of Dandelion Wine . The memory would also turn into the Martian fantasy âThe Fire Balloons,â collected in The Illustrated Man .
Samuel Hinkston Bradbury was buried at Union Cemetery on Waukeganâs west side. At age fifty-four, Minnie Bradbury was now widowed; Leo Bradbury, his younger brother, Bion, and seventeen-year-old Neva had lost their father. They all felt an immense loss. They also felt a financial burden. After Samuel Hinkston passed away, to make ends meet, Minnie Bradbury decided to rent three bedrooms of her house to boarders. Some guests stayed a short time, others lived at 619 Washington much longer.
With his grandfatherâs passing, little Ray, not yet six, had experienced death for the first time. In the days and weeks after Samuel Hinkston Bradburyâs death, Ray took in every detail, every overheard conversation, all sounds and smells, and humdrum objects in the house; they were all triggers for his runaway-freight-train mind. In the wake of death, he saw the world in a different light. His imagination was maturing every day.
Ray often liked to press his hands against the cool stained-glass window in his grandparentsâ home. The two rectangular windows were set into the wall on the staircase to the second floor. Sometimes, Ray stuck his nose to the glass and peered out through the kaleidoscope hues reminiscent of marmalades, jellies, and iced summer beverages. Yellow dandelions speckled the tiny lawn along the side of the house. Occasionally, through the stained glass, Ray spied a cat slinking across the grass or a pedestrian strolling by. He loved looking at the world through this sweet spectrum that altered the universe, and long after he moved from Waukegan, he still viewed the world in much the same wayâthrough the rainbow lens of his grandparentsâ stained-glass window. These windows appeared in his short stories âThe Man Upstairsâ (originally collected in Dark Carnival ) and âThe Strawberry Windowâ ( A Medicine for Melancholy ); both stories may be classified as âautobiographical fantasyââtales of the fantastic, mined from memory.
In 1926, Ray and his brother, Skip, went to see the movie The Phantom of the Opera at the Academy Theater in downtown Waukegan.