I told you I read mostly non-fiction but I brought with me three books, two of which are by Ray Bradbury; Dandelion Wine and Farewell Summer. Dandelion Wine is my favorite book, I have read more than a dozen times and it’s a departure from his regular science fiction novels, it’s more about simply growing up in a magic age in a magic time in a simple small town. My copy is well worn, yellowed and expanded from being carted around in a cargo pocket, in the preface is a poem…

Byzantium, I come not from,

But from another time and place

Whose race was simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois.

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan, there I came from

And not, good friends, from Byzantium.

I love this book because it reminds my own simple childhood before the realities set in. Konak Girl once put forth the question, when was the golden age? She missed the mark because the answer is simply 12. Not a year or an era but that magical time before you hit the age of 13. It is the age before you become a cynical bastard.

The book is wonderful because it reminds of the unwavering friendship between two boys named Greg and Bobby. These boys became friends growing up on the same country road 5 miles from a small town in Texas, being of the same age you realized by fate you were friends.

Greg was a chubby, freckled glasses wearing kid and Bobby was an overly skinny kid whose pants were always too short for him. They both wore Keds sneakers and certainly that was enough to have in common to bond a friendship. In the playground they wrapped their arms around each others necks and became a dreaded two-headed monster.

It was an innocent age, where like in the book, Bobby’s grandfather made dandelion wine and one morning the two boys snuck a bottle of this stuff and drank this yeasty concoction. The summer’s events were fishing and jumping into the pond that was created from damming up the creek.

It was an innocent age where war was little plastic soldiers lined up only to be knocked down by rocks, and in no way involved the burning smell of two other boys lifelessly propped up in the back seat of what was left of a Volvo, used as decoys to get passed a coalition checkpoint and kill sixty other people in a VBIED.

A year later Greg fell off a tire swing, falling into the shallow end of a pond feet first, shattering his spine. Greg died a year later in Austin from complications. Bobby became a cynical bastard.