Dandelion Wine

I’m almost overflowing with things to write about, after having slowly accumulated them as I write them down. There is a list for my subsequent posts, including such things as belief, willpower, imagination, the end of imagination, and more. Today, however, I am going to talk about the things I got out of the book Dandelion Wine. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a Ray Bradbury book. The basic story is a collection of events, like snapshots of life, detailing the summer of 1928 for a boy and his family and his town. And every day has a bottle of dandelion wine for it, and as the summer dies they can go back and point out the days when things happened.


It is an eventful summer and a beautiful tale, but for me it was also a series of thoughts and realizations. The first of these was about happiness. In the story, one of the characters attempts to make a “Happiness Machine”. After he’s done it, though, he comes to terms with the fact that it’s not really happiness he’s created, because it takes away from the happiness you already have in your own place and time. Happiness—it’s how we make it, and we’ve got to find it where we are, where we make it. It’s all relative, and we’re losing some of it in our apparent quest for happiness that’s right there in front of our faces the entire time.

Next is the thought about what’s past. Reading this kind of a book kind of makes me wish for the days when you knew all of your neighbors, when you could walk anywhere you needed to go, when people had time to relax and be with each other and the world. Sometimes I think we’re going too fast, and our technologies that are supposed to be making things easier are instead making our lives more hectic and crazy. It feels like we’ve gotten too busy to take a day off and sit on the porch watching the grass grow and the clouds move and the bees buzz, totally content. And then it feels like even when we try to take a break, to relax, that we’re so wound up worrying about all the things we’ll have to do the next day that we can’t see it for the goodness it really is. Back when we felt like we knew the world, that it was small, that it was just this town and this sky and these trees and these people, we were more in harmony with everything. Communication, transportation, and machines have somehow disconnected us, in a way, from what’s really out there, even as we feel we uncover more of it every day. Our harmony with the world is dwindling, in a sense, foundering in the waves. It needs to be rescued, I think, or else we’ll lose something important, and maybe a little more.

Last of all is a thought on memory. At the end of the summer, the Spaulding boys are looking at the bottles of Dandelion Wine, reviewing the days of the summer. They sit there and remember different incidents from the entire summer, while Grandpa says he only remembers the new kind of grass that didn’t need cutting. The boys stare at him, thinking they’ll remember it forever, but I’ve come to see that we lose a lot. Sometimes something will happen to jog my memory, and I’ll remember something; maybe hearing Nutcracker music will bring everything we did crashing back, maybe a word about an old occasion will bring it back, but through the whole scheme of things it feels like everything runs together, and it makes me sad. I want to be able to remember things, to remember the golden days of my life when I’m old. I guess that’s what diaries and journals are for, but what if you can’t remember them at all? I’m afraid of the days of my life running away like water, without me being able to remember what made me happy, what I learned, forgetting the things that I once prized as the best memories of all.

So there are my musings upon this book. It touched me because recently I never feel like there’s enough time in the world, but I’m yet so tired that I couldn’t possibly cut any sleep. I think we’re doing too much here; one of these days it’ll all crash down on us, the entire system, unless we can find some balance again. Does anyone else feel the same way? Is it just me that wants to find a slow place again?



Comment please…I’m missing comments and I wonder what you think about this and the last two posts. Until next time…