Sam: Well, hello, Rebecca.
I'm sure you're radiant as always. so the book dandelion wine is a little bit of a departure for Ray Bradbury. It was something I was introduced to in high school, and I really was just struck by the simplicity. And kind of the way he captures just the exuberance and the, the feeling of this 12 year old boy, really coming to embrace life and to feel his place in the grand scheme of things, the way he talks about the passage of time and how.
It's experienced by this boy and just that magical feeling of being at that age. And, having a sense of wonder about everything , really struck me at the time and clearly has stuck with me all these years. And I love that. Even though he goes through changes, even though there are things that happen, you know, or the summer, he still retains that amazing sense of, his place in the grand scheme of things and some idea of.
maintaining some control over what happens, not just in his personal life, but within his community. And it's just remarkably well-written and I love that it's some form of, Bradbury's memory of his own childhood. That he, he minds so effectively and so beautifully. It just, the, the, the sensory details in, in this book are really amazing, I think the, opening and the ending of this book are incredibly well done, as is the rest of the book.
I definitely highly recommended and , hope you enjoy this reading of it.
Reading - Beginning of the story
Rebecca: it was a quiet morning. The town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed, some are gathered in the weather. The wind had the proper touch and the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise lean from your window and know that this indeed was the first real time of living and freedom.
This was the first morning of summer. Douglas Spalding, 12 freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early morning stream. Buying in this third story, coupla bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him writing high in the June, wind, the grand his tower in town at night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse and all directions over swarming seas of Elm and Oak and maple. Now
Sam: Boy.
Rebecca: whispered Douglas. A whole summer ahead, cross off the calendar day by day, like the goddess Siva, probably he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour, apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed and trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze gladly in the hoarfrost frosted ice house door.
He would bake happily with 10,000 chickens in grandma's kitchen. But now a familiar task. Okay. One night, each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother, Tom asleep in their small house next door and run up here up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents cupula and in the sourcers tower, sleep with thunders and visions to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.
He stood at the open window and the dark took a deep breath and exhale. The streetlights like candles on a black cake, went out, he exhaled again and again, and the stars began to vanish Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger there. And they're now over here and here, yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as houselights who winked slowly on a sprinkle of windows came suddenly a light miles off and Don country,
Sam: Everyone yawn everyone up.
Rebecca: the great house stirred below.
Sam: Grandpa. Get your teeth from the water class,
Rebecca: He waited a decent interval,
Sam: grandma and great grandma fry hotcakes.
Rebecca: the warm center, fried batter rows in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins in their rooms.
Sam: Street where all the old people live. Wake up, miss Helen Loomis kernel freely. Ms. Bentley cough. Get up, take pills, move around. Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse. Get your junk wagon out and around.
Rebecca: The oblique mansions across the town. Ravine opened a bale full dragon eyes . Soon in the morning, avenues below two old woman would glide their electric green machine waving at all the dogs.
Sam: Mr. Brenda, the car barn.
Rebecca: Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it. The town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets
Sam: Ready, John Hough. Charlie Woodman.
Rebecca: whispered Douglas to the street of children. two baseballs sponge deep in wetlands. Two rope swings, hung empty entries.
Sam: Mom, dad, Tom, wake up.
Rebecca: Clock alarms. Tinkled faintly the courthouse clock, boomed birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing Douglas, conducting an orchestra pointed to the Eastern sky. The sun began to rise. He folded his arms and smiled and magician smile.
Sam: Yes, sir.
Rebecca: He thought
Sam: Everyone jumps. Everyone runs when I yell, it'll be a fine season.
Rebecca: he gave the town a last snap of his fingers. Doors slammed open people stepped out summer 1928 began.

Ending
at one 30 in the deep dark morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs. One by one came women in curlers men in battle ropes to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen. Let only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And they're in the black kitchen at to have a warm summer morning, grandma floated like an apparition amidst bangings and clattering half blind.
Once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering cuddles her face in the firelight, red, magical and enchanted as she seized and stirred and pour the sublime food. Her face in the firelight, red, magical and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.
quiet, quiet. The boarders laid the best linens and gleaning silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap. This bell.
Grandfather arriving home from a late evenings work at the printing office was startled to hear grace being said in the candle lit dining room as for the food. The meats were deviled. The sauces carried the greens mounted with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with Juul, honey, everything to some luscious and some miraculously refreshing that agenda.
Lowing broken. Yeah. As from a pasturage of beast, gone wild and Clover one, and I'll cry it out. Their gratitude for their loose fitting nightclothes. At three 30 on Sunday morning with the house warm with eaten food and friendly spirits. Grandfather pushed back his chair and gestured magnificently. From the library.
He fetched a copy of Shakespeare. He was, I made it on a platter, which he presented to his wife,
Sam: grandma.
Rebecca: He said.
Sam: ask only that tomorrow night for supper, you cook us this very fine volume. I am certain, we all agree that by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at Twilight, it will be delicate. Succulent Brown and tender is the breast of the autumn pheasant. Okay.
Rebecca: Grandma held the book in her hands and cried happily. They lingered on toward Dawn with brief desserts wine from those wild flowers growing in the front yard. And then as the first birds winked to life and the sun threatened the Eastern sky, they all crept upstairs. Douglas, listened to the stove, cooling in the faraway kitchen. He heard grandma go to bed

Sam: junk bin,
Rebecca: He thought.
Sam: mr. Jonas, wherever you are. You're thanked. You're paid back. I passed it on. I sure did. I think I passed it on.
Rebecca: He slept and dreamed in the dream. The bell was ringing and all of them were yelling and rushing down to breakfast. And then quite suddenly summer was over. He knew at first when walking downtown, Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping at the dime store window, they stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed.
So neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly there.
Sam: Pencils dug 10,000 pencils. Oh my gosh. Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers watercolors, rulers campuses, a hundred thousand on them. Don't look, maybe it's just a Mirage. No
Rebecca: Tom and
Sam: school school's straight on ahead. Why, why do dime store show things like that in windows before summer's even over ruin half the vacation?
Rebecca: They walked on home and found grandfather alone on the sear, bald spotted lawn plucking, the last few dandelions. They worked with him silently for a time. And then Douglas spent in his own shadow and said,
Sam: Um, if this year's gone like this, what will next year be better or worse? Don't ask me,
Rebecca: Tom a tune on a dandelion STEM.
Sam: didn't make the world.
Rebecca: He thought about it.
Sam: Though some days, I feel like I did.
Rebecca: His dad happily
Sam: I got a hunch.
Rebecca: said, Douglas.
Sam: next year is going to be even bigger days will be brighter nights, longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born and me in the middle of it. All you and two zillion, other people, Doug. Remember. Hey, like today, I feel it'll be just me. Need any help? Just yell. What could a 10 year old brother do?
A 10 year old brother will be 11. Next summer, all unwind the world. Like the rubber band on a golf balls insights every morning. Put it back together every night. Show you how if you ask. Crazy. Always was
Rebecca: Tom crossed his eyes stuck out his
Sam: always, will be
Rebecca: Douglas laughed. They went down in the salary with grandpa and while he decapitated the flowers, they looked at all the summer shelves and glimmering there in the motionless streams, the bottles of dandelion wine numbered from one to 90 odd, they're the ketchup bottles.
Most of them full now stood burning in the cellar Twilight one for every living summer day. Said Tom
Sam: swell way to save June, July, and August real practical,
Rebecca: grandfather looked up considering this and smile.
Sam: better than putting things in the attic. You never use again, this way you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there, along the way through the winter. And when the bottles are empty. The summer's gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about free to stumble over 40 years from now clean, smokeless efficient.
That's dandelion wine.
Rebecca: The two boys pointed along the row of bottles.
Sam: There's the first day of summer. There's the new tennis shoes day. Sure. And there's the green machine? Buffalo. Dustin shingling SU the taro, which the lonely one. It's not really over.
Rebecca: Said Tom
Sam: never be over. I'll remember what happened on every day of this year forever. It was over before it began.
Rebecca: said, grandpa unwinding the wine press.
Sam: don't remember a thing that happened except some new type of grass that wouldn't need. Cutting. You're joking. No, sir. Doug, Tom, you'll find, as you get older, the days kind of blur. Can't tell one from the other, but heck on Monday, this week I roller skated to the left at electric park. Tuesday ate chocolate cake.
Wednesday fell in the Crick. Thursday fell off a swinging vine. The week's been full of things. And today I'll remember today because the leaves outside are beginning to get all red and yellow. Won't be long. There'll be all over the lawn and we'll jump in piles of them and burn them. I'll never forget today.
I'll always remember. I know,
Rebecca: Grandfather looked up through the cellar window at the late summer trees stirring in a cooler wind.
Sam: of course you will, Tom,
Rebecca: You.
Sam: of course you will.
Rebecca: And they left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went stairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer. So they felt that now the final day, the final night had gone as the day grew late. They realized that for two or three nights in a row now porches had emptied early of their inhabitants.
The air had a different dryer smell, and grandma was talking of hot coffee instead of ice tea. The open light fluttered curtain windows were closing in the great base cold cuts. We're giving way to steamed beef. The mosquitoes were gone from the porch and surely when they abandoned the conflict, the war with time was really done and there was nothing for it, but that humans also forsake the battleground.
Now Tom and Douglas and grandfather stood as they had stood three months, or was it three long centuries ago on this front porch, which creaked like a ship slumbering at night in growing swells. And they sniffed the air inside the boys.
Bones felt like chalk and ivory instead of green mint sticks and licorice whips as earlier in the year. ' but the new cold touched grandfather's skeleton first, like a raw hand Cordingley yellow bass piano keys in the dining room as the compass turns.
So it turned grandfather North.
Sam: I guess
Rebecca: He said, deliberating.
Sam: we won't be coming out here anymore.
Rebecca: And the three of them claimed the chains shaken down from the porch ceiling islets and carried the swing like a weathered beer around to the garage, followed by a blowing of the first dried leaves inside the haired grandmother poking up a fire in the library. The windows shook with a sudden gust of wind Douglas spending the last night in the coupla tower above grandma and grandpa wrote in his tablet.
Sam: Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films. Sometimes where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September, you push down the windows. You pushed up. Take off the sneakers. She put on, pull on the hard shoes she threw away. Last June, people run in the house now like birds jumping back inside clocks one minute, porches loaded.
Everyone gabbing 32, a dozen next minute door slam, talk stops and leaves. Fall off trees like crazy.
Rebecca: He looked from the high window at the land where the crickets were strewn, like dried figs in the Creek beds at a sky where birds would wheel South. Now through the cry of autumn looms and were trees would go up and a great, fine burning of color on the steely clouds. Way out in the country tonight, he could smell the pumpkins ripening towards the knife and the triangle.
I in the singeing candle here in town, the first few scarves of smoke unwound from chimneys and the faint faraway quaking of iron was the rush of black hard rivers of cold down. And the faint far away, quaking of iron was the rush of black hard rivers of coal down shoots building high, dark mounds in cellar bins, but it was getting later, but it was late.
And getting later Douglas was in the high coupla, above the town, moved his hand. Oh shit. Ham Douglas in the high coupla, above the town, moved his hand.
Sam: close it off.
Rebecca: You waited, the wind blew icing the window pane
Sam: Brush teeth
Rebecca: here. We had it again.
Sam: now
Rebecca: He said at last
Sam: with the lights.
Rebecca: he blinked . And the town winked out its lights sleepily here, there as the courthouse clock struck 10, 10 30, 11, and drowsy midnight.
Sam: The last ones now they're there.
Rebecca: He lay in his bed and the town's slept around him. And the ravine was dark and the Lake was moving quietly on its shore and everyone, his family, his friends, the old people, and the young slept on one street or another in one house or another, or slept in the far country, church yards. Hey, shut his eyes.
June Don's July Nunes, August evenings, over finished, done and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of the summer past. And if he should forget. The dandelion wine stood in the cellar numbered huge for each and every day, he would go there often stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more than close his eyes and consider the burn spots.
The fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids, arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear. So thinking he slept. And sleeping put an end to summer 1928.

Blooper
Wow.
Sam: That was awesome.
Rebecca: Should we do the ending part
Sam: Oh yeah. I would totally should.
Rebecca: Yeah, he closes it up. Oh my God.
Sam: Hello?
Rebecca: Is it at the very end of the,
Sam: Uh, yeah, it is